A group of developers are working with Apple to bring the iPhone 15 Pro’s console games over to the iPad and Mac.
In a new interview, Jeremy Sandmel, Apple’s Senior Director of GPU Software, and Tim Millet, Apple’s VP of Platform Architecture, discussed the iPhone 15 Pro’s more advanced gaming capabilities. During Apple’s “Wonderlust” media event, Apple detailed how its new A17 Pro chip offers a new GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, enabling console games like “Resident Evil 4” and “Assassin’s Creed: Mirage” to be played on the iPhone.
When asked if these games would be compatible with Apple Silicon-based iPads and Macs, Millet said “The developers are going to work with us to do it.”
He also added the following:
“…one of the things that fundamentally enabled that is this unification of the architecture of Apple Silicon and the iPhone Silicon and the iPad Silicon. And so you can see that they’re able to do exactly what you just suggested, which is bring a game to iPhone and Mac that is the same game. It’s the same rendering, it’s the same rendering quality and it’s the same game they had on a gaming PC and a console.
So we really look at these many generations of SoC architecture across the phone, across the iPad, across now, Apple Silicon Macs. And we’d see that as part of one big unified platform, a graphics and gaming platform in particular.”
Given that these console titles are purportedly enabled by hardware advancements found within the A17 Pro, it seems possible that Apple is alluding to next-generation iPads and Macs with M3 chips here.
Features such as DisplayPort support are built into the USB-C port on all iPhone 15 models, meaning that the devices can output video at up to 4K/60Hz natively to a DisplayPort-equipped external display or TV with a supported USB-C to DisplayPort cable. or previous iPhones with a Lightning port, video mirroring output had been limited to 1080p with Apple’s Lightning-to-HDMI or Lightning-to-VGA adapters.
Asked if, given the device’s DisplayPort capabilities, iPhone 15 Pro owners would be able to play the likes of Resident Evil 4 on an external display, Sandmel replied:
“As you probably know, there’s the display resolution and then there’s the gaming resolution, and then the frame rates, the game rendering. With technologies like MetalFX’s upscaling, we can sort of separate those two things. The game can run at really high frame rates, get really great quality results, and then upscale whatever resolution the display, whether that’s the iPhone display, whether that’s an external display. So yes, the iPhone can connect to these 4K displays, and it can drive them externally doing whatever you do on the phone, including gaming to these other displays. The resolution and frame rate are going to highly depend on what the game’s actually doing.”
The iPhone does not presently offer a dedicated extended display mode, but it’s possible to mirror an iPhone to an external display via a wired connection, as well as AirPlay.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.