The iPhone 15 Pro's natively supported games include Assassin's Creed Mirage, Resi Village...

[midian182]

Recap: There was a lot to take in during Apple's Wonderlust event, especially when it comes to games on the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple said its device represents the "next generation of mobile gaming," offering native support for massive titles such as Assassin's Creed Mirage and the Resident Evil 4 Remake.

Native mobile games - as in, those not being streamed from the cloud or other devices - have improved a lot over the last few years, but they're still not on the same level as modern PC or console titles. Apple says that will change with iPhone 15 Pro.

Apple is promising a slew of gaming-specific features in the iPhone 15 Pro, including a brand-new GPU with an Apple-designed shader architecture. The company said it focused on performance and efficiency, complex applications, and new rendering features in the 3nm A17 Pro's 6-core GPU, which is 20% faster than its predecessor.

Sribalan Santhanam, VP of Apple's silicon engineering group, said that for the first time, the GPU also offers hardware-accelerated ray tracing, "featuring the fastest ray-tracing performance in any smartphone." Apple said the GPU offers up to four times faster ray tracing compared to software ray tracing on the A16 Bionic.

Some games coming to the iPhone 15 Pro this year include Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4 Remake, and Death Stranding, while The Division Resurgence, which is a FTP mobile game, and Assassin's Creed Mirage will arrive next year.

"This is the first time the console version of Assassin's Creed will be natively available on a smartphone," said Apple's SVP of marketing, Greg Joswiak. The next entry in the Assassin's Creed series, Mirage, lands on the PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and Xbox One on October 5, ahead of its release on iPhone 15 Pro in the first half of 2024.

Apple made plenty of impressive claims about the iPhone 15 Pro's gaming abilities during yesterday's event, though it might be best to reserve judgment until the titles arrive on the device.

Apple's iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will be available to pre-order starting September 15 in four colors: natural titanium, blue titanium, white titanium, or black titanium. The phones will launch and ship to customers a week later on September 22.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/100132-iphone-15-pro-natively-supported-games-include-assassin.html

 

[brucek]

Given Apple's propensity to charge large amounts of money for little amounts of storage, even if they do bring enough CPU and GPU horsepower to the table, including ability to cool it, I still don't see how their devices could hold full-size editions of more than a few modern triple AAA games. We're regularly seeing 100 GB+ install sizes for recent games and the storage options on even the iPhone 15 Pro are 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, with the lion's share of the volume probably on the first three.

 

[Porkous]

The kind of announcement I like to hear.
Apple is smart to bring these.
Everyone does not believe mobile GPU's are impressive. Is time for apple to show that they are.

 

[kiwigraeme]

May be impressive - but let's see in real world, how battery , temps etc hold out
Googled - can get snap on controller so assuming you get 256Gb minimum as a Pro user ( space for videos etc as well ) + $100 for controller

This must be a long term project for Apple - to try and bring PC gaming to it's users
Thing is more steam decks coming , a new switch coming - bigger screens - dedicated gaming
Given that - would be a great option for Ipad pro users with a big colourful screen

Plus those Ipad pros are at home - like the controllers , like the PC/PS5/Xbox/Switch
So what pro phone user will lug the controllers around to play on the move
TBF suppose a nice bonus to have away on work in a hotel

 

[ScottSoapbox]

We’ll finally have a real world comparison of gaming power. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up.

This is 2 nodes ahead of the steam deck but 1/3 of the power envelope.

 

[Dimitriid]

Yep sure thing Apple.

Let's also remember how much they talked about gaming when the M1 launched and how much people wanted to speculate Apple would finally be able to game. Meanwhile those 3 AAA titles mind end up being the only ones the new iphone ever gets.

Problem is not just the entire ecosystem is just not built for it like @brucek points nothing can really be done about the tiny storage options, lack of physical controls, etc. But that we kinda know that Apple just likes to basically, waste a lot of it's horse power with no actual IRL benefit whenever its CPU or GPU or the ML cores on the chip.

These numbers are basically advertising for game developers and the subtext for me it's clear 'Don't be afraid to scale up your garbage gacha games you wont need to spend too much time optimizing since you'll be able to brute-force run them on our devices now' This works well for devs because well, most of the iphone centric games are at their core, mobile games centered around tactics like the aforementioned gacha mechanics: iphone games are designed by their devs to be run for a limited time anyway to ensure microtransactions. So on that end, it doesn't really matter if the iphone would be a terrible ecosystem for AAA games it just matter than the thing can run it, devs can get more lazy on their garbage games and the iphone would still mostly power through and battery life or heating issues won't matter because oh look at that! You just ran out of lives/gems/coins/whatever! Time to wait for an hour unless you want to buy this power up for only 9.99!

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Given Apple's propensity to charge large amounts of money for little amounts of storage, even if they do bring enough CPU and GPU horsepower to the table, including ability to cool it, I still don't see how their devices could hold full-size editions of more than a few modern triple AAA games. We're regularly seeing 100 GB+ install sizes for recent games and the storage options on even the iPhone 15 Pro are 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, with the lion's share of the volume probably on the first three.

The games wont need to be 100GB on the iphone tho, that's largely due to the textures and other assets for higher resolution setups. On a phone lower settings will suffice and all the duplicate assets for other settings can be removed.

 

[brucek]

The games wont need to be 100GB on the iphone tho, that's largely due to the textures and other assets for higher resolution setups. On a phone lower settings will suffice and all the duplicate assets for other settings can be removed.

Yes, I totally agree that's the reality, and completely fine for a 5" screen, but what that means is no the iPhone is not truly delivering console or PC level gaming power. Which of course we understood all along.

(None of this is a complaint from me by the way. I don't need or want to play the same game on a small device, with my thumbs, for probably a few minutes at a time, that I do when I'm settled into my real setup. Although I guess if one day I could just buy the phone and nothing else, and have it stream a true 4K experience to my TV when I want it, I wouldn't complain.)

 

[m4a4]

Yeah, no one is actually taking a phone seriously when it comes to AAA games. Apple is just throwing some money at these games for PR reasons; I doubt they would've been ported otherwise.

Why would most gamers want to lock themselves into the Apple Ecosystem with such a big game purchase? Better off looking at a streaming service (where you aren't as locked in) if you really want to play these games on such a small screen.

 

[EdmondRC]

I have no doubt this will be the most powerful mobile device that you can buy when its launched, it's also $1500, which would build you a nice gaming computer or buy a new console and still have $1000. I get that it might be able to do high-end gaming, but until it is reasonably priced, it's just not going to be the go-to gaming device for anyone. It will always be more of a novelty that it can play a few AAA titles that are on console/PC.

 

[toooooot]

Given Apple's propensity to charge large amounts of money for little amounts of storage, even if they do bring enough CPU and GPU horsepower to the table, including ability to cool it, I still don't see how their devices could hold full-size editions of more than a few modern triple AAA games. We're regularly seeing 100 GB+ install sizes for recent games and the storage options on even the iPhone 15 Pro are 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB, with the lion's share of the volume probably on the first three.

I have a very small hope "apple games" will be smaller sizes using tools to compress textures and other weighty elements. It would be funny if you bought a game for iphone to realize it is too big to fit on your 128gb phone.
Maybe they will allow to install large games on external storage devices?

 

[toooooot]

Yeah, no one is actually taking a phone seriously when it comes to AAA games. Apple is just throwing some money at these games for PR reasons; I doubt they would've been ported otherwise.

Why would most gamers want to lock themselves into the Apple Ecosystem with such a big game purchase? Better off looking at a streaming service (where you aren't as locked in) if you really want to play these games on such a small screen.

I see this feature as something not designed for avid gamers. It is for people who love apple and love to play games occasionally. In before, they had a need to keep another device, a console, a handheld device. Now they do not need to.
I wonder if other chip companies will try to achieve the same. Can Samsung or Qualcomm do the same?
This will be interesting to see.

 

[Bobbydpue]

I see this feature as something not designed for avid gamers. It is for people who love apple and love to play games occasionally. In before, they had a need to keep another device, a console, a handheld device. Now they do not need to.
I wonder if other chip companies will try to achieve the same. Can Samsung or Qualcomm do the same?
This will be interesting to see.

Without knowing the actual real-world performance I wouldn't call anything an achievement.

Also who would buy a monitor with a hole in the display? I wouldn't want to game on a device where part of the display is obscured with a stupid pill shaped hole. .

 

[toooooot]

Without knowing the actual real-world performance I wouldn't call anything an achievement.

Also who would buy a monitor with a hole in the display? I wouldn't want to game on a device where part of the display is obscured with a stupid pill shaped hole. .

It can be run at 1080 or below easily, a small screen allows for a lower resolution without noticing it.
It is an achievement non the less. First freaking phone running current tech aaa pc/console game. They did it first. Nobody can take it away now.