Is the iPhone 17 Pro really the fastest phone? I've reviewed today's top phones, and here's what lab tests tell me about Apple's claim

Is the Apple A19 Pro the fastest chipset? Yes and no...

Features By Philip Berne published 17 September 2025

(Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)

When Apple announced the iPhone 17 Pro, it said the Apple A19 Pro processor inside was the fastest chip you'll find in a mobile device today – and now that we have the iPhone 17 family in our hands, we’ve run all of Apple’s new phones through the same tests we use for every phone we test.

By some benchmarks, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are today’s top phones, but the complete story is more interesting… and Android fans have reason to hope.

Apple’s claim likely relies on pure application processing performance. Apple’s CPU has six processing cores, and our benchmark software, Geekbench, tests the top performance of the biggest core, as well as the top performance of the entire multi-core platform working together.

The Apple A18 Pro processor in the iPhone 16 Pro was our fastest-performing phone in terms of single-core performance. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite (and the 'for Galaxy' upclocked edition in the best Samsung phones) beat the A18 Pro in multicore performance. Our first question is whether Apple’s newest A19 Pro takes the multicore crown.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max scored 9968 on Geekbench multicore benchmark tests, and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, the fastest Android we've tested, scored 9829. So the new Apple A19 Pro is the fastest processor in any mobile phone for both single-core and multicore performance…

The iPhone 17 Pro is the fastest phone... unless you're a gamer

But wait! Just like laptop and desktop computers, today’s top mobile phones also have a graphics processor, and we test graphics performance using a variety of software tools. Using the popular 3DMark benchmark software, for instance, we see Apple’s performance dominance waver quite a bit.

On the 3DMark ‘Solar Bay Unlimited’ test, the iPhone 17 Pro Max managed a respectable 14.43 frames per second. The Galaxy S25 Ultra, on the other hand, drove a whopping 42.36 frames per second on the same test. That’s a massive boost in graphics performance.

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