Your New iPhone Can Play AAA Games

Agreed on all fronts. It’s not great, but it’s something—and something is pretty cool. I have found that using a peltier cooler does quite a bit to sustain performance at higher settings but they draw a lot of power, look ridiculous, and preclude you from using a Backbone which—I agree—is surprisingly ergonomic. Technology is cool and I’m excited for the future!!

Mobile gaming has some pretty negative connotations given how rife microtransactions and ads have become. Casual games have always worked on mobile, like angry birds or fruit ninja, but if Apple can get enough AAA developers on board, that would be great. Apple are clearly far more interested in gaming than they have ever been in the past, and now they’ve got the hardware and platform integration to support it. They just need developers to build for it.

Took a flight last week and had a Bluetooth controller. Connected it up and played INSIDE for over 3hrs and lost like 30% battery on a 15 pro. It looks fantastic and I was actually taken aback by how well it worked. I know its not a demanding game but still, I worked exactly as it should. Crazy world

I'd like to see Linus try this on the M2 iPad Pro and use the Backbone with a USB-C to C cable as it's controller :D I do this sometimes and its legitimately awesome that I can use it on different devices!

I don't care about playing AAA on mobile, but this will encourage development in the indie scene as well. Switch dramatically boosted the indie scene exposure due to the portability, and we'll find similar result if they expand development in iphone.

Playing AAA games natively on a smartphone not meant for PC games is pretty neat. Sure it's not 4K but who cares. You're playing Resident Evil on a smartphone. Without Geforce Now. For a first gen trial, I see this as an absolute win.

Love the little dot that moves across the graphs to highlight which datapoints are being talked about. Marked improvement on how they used to do it.

Great diagrams! The little indicator ball makes it so much easier to watch the videos without having to pause the video to understand what is being referenced in the voice over.

id love to see a bunch of older games get ported something that might be a bit easier to run so you can get 60fps

Love the cursor helping with understanding the graphs, not very useful for such basic graphs but definitely a great idea and super helpful for more cluttered graphs!

Playing death stranding on my iPhone is my favorite part of my day

This remind me of the time when they launched RE4 on mobile and a lot of people where going crazy for it, granted that was a watered down experience and this one is apparently the full thing, so, while I'm not really interested in gaming on my phone, it's good to see how far mobile gaming can go.

Hi LTT! just so you know, your link for the backbone controller is for the lightning version, but this game only runs on the 15 pro which is USB-C.

From what I have seen from other coverage it looks like the iPhone is CPU limited at 720p and below, which is why the upscaler didn't have much of a performance effect. Considering the A17 only has 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores that result is still crazy impressive.

The best mobile gaming experience I've ever had was in 2010 when I had an iPhone 3gs and Call of Duty world at war Zombies was available in the app store for like 20usd. It played so well and was was the entire "mini game" of COD zombies I used to play it for hours. The only mobile gaming experience I've had that has any where near as good was when old school runescape came to android in 2018

We've seen plenty of abandoned games/apps for Android and iOS. The developer eventually stops supporting the app, the app is no longer compatible with a recent version of the OS and eventually gets delisted. Meanwhile I have steam purchases from 15 years ago that I can still install and play despite the game not having been updated in over a decade.

Very small, but it is nice to see Armored Core VI being included in the list of AAA games

I love the new pointer on the graphs, helps with following which numbers your actually talking about !

Maybe this might encourage developers to finally port their switch releases to mobile, switch's arm soc is significantly weaker than even the flagship processors a few years ago so there's that. My biggest concern is devs figuring out touch controls, I don't think touch controls have been perfected by anyone, so innovation on that front would be great for everyone involved. I think publishers and store fronts would need to be way clearer on their supported devices on ios/android and just flat out refuse to install if you don't meet certain hardware requirements, considering the lower end of the mobile processors haven't made much performance gains over the years in comparison to their high end flagship counterparts, owing to the fact you don't really need much performance to run android + social media apps + web browsing smoothly on a device (even a 5 year old budget device with a competent soc can pull that off well enough as long as you debloat or run a clean rom on it), and mobile games generally target the lowest common denominator.

Having the same hardware (in terms of programming architecture) between Macbooks and IOS devices isn't something I thought about when I heard about apple silicon. It certainly makes supporting both platforms simultaneously quite a bit easier.