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.
