iPhone 15 Pro
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Apple executives discussed the gaming capabilities of the iPhone 15 Pro, with MetalFX and many other elements doing a lot of work to make your new smartphone a powerful tool for portable gaming.
During Apple's “Wonderlust” event, the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip was hailed as a powerful chip with many elements that can benefit gaming. The iPhone's improvements have been enough that major publishers have reportedly begun bringing their own versions of Triple-A games to the small screen.
In an interview with IGN, senior Apple officials spoke about various changes made to the premium smartphone that led to this situation.
When asked about external display support and whether the iPhone 15 Pro will be able to run games on a 4K monitor, Senior Director of GPU Software Jeremy Sandmel explained how games can be rendered at a single resolution, and displayed in another display. “With technologies like MetalFX scaling, we can kind of separate those two things,” he explained.
Sandmel continued: “The game can run at very high frame rates, get really great results, and then upsample any display resolution, whether it's an iPhone display or an external display.”
VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millett added: “The building blocks are already there. We can enable applications to implement that experience, and then the developer's job, of course, is to try to take those tools and put them together.” and create an experience for you, the player, to make it all come together.”
Thermal conditions and environmental friendliness
On the topic of overheating in graphics-intensive games, vice- President Kayann Drance, who markets iPhone products around the world, tried to explain these improvements.
“At a system level, we can work across teams to understand what performance we're delivering, how it will translate into actual gameplay, and whether we can not only achieve those amazing frames. speed, peak performance and graphics that Jeremy talked about and whether we can support them.”
Millet pointed out that developers are given “this wonderful set of tools” to work with, and while they may want to “burn a hole in the back of the phone” with the GPU, Apple won't do that. let that happen, “but they could definitely do something that probably wouldn't be optimal for the experience.”
By providing tools like MetalFX, Millet adds that developers can “really explode, maintaining the experience for much longer if they want to. And they can scale it up and down depending on the experience they want to achieve. But it’s all about giving them the tools to create a sustainable experience.”
The work that goes into this isn't just limited to MetalFX, as Millet insists that “we do it across the entire system: for example, the display's “really amazing built-in upscaling technology” and the GPU. “So with features like ray tracing and mesh shading, and this really advanced computing architecture, the developer has access to all of these algorithms to figure out what the best balance of compute, quality, performance, frame rate and resolution is.”
Valuable console targets
How powerful the iPhone 15 Pro compares to modern consoles, the group refuses to give a specific answer, and instead using the term is “just a convenient way for us to talk about classic games and the types of games that developers are targeting, who we're targeting.”
Drance believes it's the experience that matters: a portable camera and “memory capture” device that is now “a powerful gaming console, but one that's in your pocket and you can take it anywhere, play over different wireless networks, playing different games, in different ways.”
Sandmel concludes: “I think they say the best gaming console is the one you have with you.”
