Digital Foundry released a review of the iPhone 15 Pro version of “Castle 4: Remastered” on Youtube, saying that this version aims to experience the PS4 version, but it does not fully achieve the goal. It’s suitable for mobile play, but to say it’s a “3A-level experience” might be too much.
Apple equipped the iPhone 15 Pro with the industry’s first 3nm process chip, which significantly enhanced GPU performance and supported hardware acceleration, ray tracing and other technologies. Information from Apple’s official website shows that the A17 Pro’s graphics processor is faster than the iPhone 12 Pro The speed increase is up to 70%.
Although it is impossible to clearly compare which level of iPhone 15 Pro’s GPU is equivalent to that of a PC, what you can refer to is the minimum hardware requirements for the PC version of the latest game “Assassin’s Creed Visions”: Intel i5 processor, NVIDIA GTX 1060, 8GB RAM, 70GB hard drive space, and the recommended requirements are: GTX 1080. In other words, the graphics performance of the iPhone 15 Pro has reached the level of a mid-range gaming PC.
However, it now seems that the ability to run these games may be achieved by the iPhone 15 lowering the resolution of the games.
Digital Foundry stated that the PS4 version is the version closest to the iPhone version, with some significant reductions in visual effects. Most of the textures look very similar between the two versions. However, the iPhone version uses lower-resolution textures in many scenes, and the entire game world looks a bit blurry, but overall it’s not noticeable.
The lighting effects of the iPhone version and the PS4 version are very similar, but the density of some small items and leaves has been reduced. The shadow effect of the iPhone version is somewhat unsatisfactory and looks very rough. This may be related to the lower original resolution of this version and the MetalFX AI upscaler has difficulty processing these shadows.
After testing, the resolution of some images was only 300p. It is speculated that MetalFX machine learning technology was used to increase the resolution to 720p. This kind of resolution looks good when static, but becomes very blurry during large movements. In addition, the game also experienced long-term freezes and performance issues, and in some cases could not maintain a stable 30 frames.
For a long time, Apple has not been very satisfied with its game performance. But for Apple, the gaming market has rich potential, and it has been trying to win over gamers on Mac or iPhone, but the results have not been successful. Mainly because 3A masterpieces on PCs used Microsoft DirectX in the past, while macOS only supported OpenGL before, resulting in a poor gaming experience.
In 2018, Apple abandoned OpenGL and developed Metal, making it possible to transplant masterpieces. But it still depends on whether game manufacturers pay for Apple and whether they are willing to launch corresponding versions for Mac or iPhone.
