Triple-A gaming on mobile phones? Up until now, the chances of it happening seemed vanishingly slight owing to the sheer range of hardware with a staggering breadth of horsepower and the correspondingly fragmented audience. Why attempt to port a game like Death Stranding to a phone if the vast majority of the audience can’t run it? And do games like Death Stranding actually work as a mobile experience to begin with? We’re about to find out, as last week’s Apple keynote revealed two new iPhones – the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max – running games including Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil Village, Assassin’s Creed Mirage and, yes, Death Stranding.
Apple says this is all made possible owing to the new GPU found within its cutting-edge A17 Pro silicon – the first 3nm processor to hit a mainstream consumer device. That GPU supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing on top of a mooted 20 percent increase in general performance over its predecessor. The A17 Pro in general looks phenomenal, adding further CPU horsepower to its already market-leading performance, along with a larger, faster Neural Engine. Accelerated machine learning features? That’ll be useful for the Metal FX upscaler, which we’ve already seen working on Mac, delivering results comparable with the market-leading Nvidia DLSS.
Other features of the iPhone 15 Pro range also impress, with a 120Hz variable refresh rate display, HDR and a relatively manageable screen resolution. Combined with Metal FX upscaling, the A17 Pro should be able to deliver a good level of GPU horsepower per pixel while retaining excellent image quality. This topic is just one of a range of items covered in the new DF Direct Weekly, conveniently posted for your audiovisual enjoyment below.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:35 News 01: Sony September State of Play0:37:42 News 02: September Nintendo Direct0:49:58 News 03: Starfield post-release update plans detailed!0:55:03 News 04: Horizon Forbidden West to hit PC?0:59:04 News 05: Immortals of Aveum patched, developer cuts staff1:07:16 News 06: iPhone 15 Pro gets ray tracing support, big budget games1:15:16 Supporter Q1: With compromised releases like Jedi: Survivor, don’t publishers realize they are leaving sales on the table? And will Respawn disable some of the game’s problematic screen-space reflections?1:23:21 Supporter Q2: Are the higher-end versions of a given graphics card worth it?1:27:30 Supporter Q3: Which GPU of the past gave you the feeling that it was a quality product?1:31:22 Supporter Q4: Is it possible that the Switch 2 could exceed the RT abilities of current-gen consoles?1:34:25 Supporter Q5: Now that the PS5 Pro rumours have firmed up, do you think the console is worthwhile?1:41:11 Supporter Q6: What is something happening in gaming right now that makes you happy?
So, the hardware is there to get the job done and by strictly defining these titles for A17 Pro hardware only, Apple has thrust a stake into the ground about necessary hardware requirements, with no chance of people buying games they can’t run. The good news is that as time progresses, those hardware requirements will gradually permeate down to lower-end, more affordable phones. The precedent is already there as the standard iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus are running the A16 Bionic from last year’s iPhone 14 Pro flagship.