Your New iPhone Can Play AAA Games

Is Apple about to change the mobile gaming scene forever? With AAA titles becoming playable from the same device you binge Tik Tok and text your friends from before slipping it into your pocket, we could be entering a whole new era.

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:19 Mobile Gaming
2:30 Village on iPhone
4:00 Backbone
4:50 Village on Ally
6:15 Village on Switch
8:05 Performance Testing
10:18 MetalFX
11:30 Battery
12:15 Display
13:05 Conclusion
15:45 Outro

[alanharper]

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.

[joelconolly]

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.

[snazzy]

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!!

[brandonlee]

I dont think cloud gaming is the future. I think mobile gaming from the mobile hardware is the future. The input lag over wifi seems to be a hard thing to fix

[erickaracsonyi]

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

[FFXfever]

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.

[rafatvaz]

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!

[smashallpots]

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

[iprocrastinatee]

M1 ipad pro 12.9 user here, my experience playing Residential Evil was so different. I set the settings to the highest and played for 2 hours. Please note that the ipad was plugged in the whole time. I live in UK so it was cold and that kept the ipad cool throughout the gaming session. The framerate was set to 120 too. The ipad ran the game smothly!!

[Shervan]

4:27 bro doesn’t miss a opportunity for advertising 😂

[Texas_]

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.

[isned]

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.

[benjaminadupuis]

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.

[AvengeButterscotch]

I have a 4090 i9 Gaming PC yet i still love to play on my phone. When im on the train, waiting around in some random place. I’m super happy to see apple start to work on their gaming on phones

[ethanhouck]

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

[scott]

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

[bluesillybeard]

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.

[KoreanFalcon]

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!

[luxar]

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.

[cuve_ae]

Just bought a backbone controller for my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I’ve been playing Resident Evil Village and it’s incredible what the A17 Pro chip can do.
I’m not even a gamer but am now excited for the games coming to Apple.