The launch of Resident Evil Village on the iPhone would be a pretty big deal on its own – proving that Apple’s claims about the gaming capabilities of the A17 Pro chip have real substance to them – but one piece argues that it could signal a whole new future for gaming on Apple devices.
A future where we not only see a slew of AAA games on Macs, but where the Apple ecosystem as a whole becomes a solid gaming platform …
Raytracing on the iPhone 15 Pro models
One of the main things Apple showed off when announcing the A17 Pro chip which powers the two iPhone 15 Pro models is hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Resident Evil Village was cited as taking advantage of this.
Now with hardware-accelerated ray tracing — which is 4x faster than software-based ray tracing — iPhone 15 Pro offers smoother graphics, as well as more immersive AR applications and gaming experiences. iPhone 15 Pro brings true-to-life gaming to the palm of users’ hands with console titles never before seen on a smartphone, like Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, Death Stranding Director’s Cut, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Resident Evil Village on the iPhone
The Verge’s Jay Peters says he was blown away by the performance of the game on the iPhone 15 Pro.
It’s incredible that Resident Evil Village plays as well as it does on the iPhone. The game is every bit as captivating as when I first played it on the PS5, and I was blown away by how well it translated to the tinier screen […] I honestly marveled at being able to play the full Resident Evil Village on a device that fits in my pocket.
He had some grumbles. You do really need a games controller (he uses the PS5 DualSense controller sold by Apple), and he found the multi-stage downloads annoying. But he said the bigger excitement is what this might mean for gaming on Apple devices more generally.
A whole new future for Apple gaming?
Apple has argued that the common architecture between Apple’s A-series and M-series chips means that if a developer is porting a game to one, they might as well do it to all.
“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,” Apple’s Jeremy Sandmel said in an interview with IGN. “So that’s the opportunity here for these game developers.”
Peters believes this is a realistic scenario – and if Apple and developers implement it properly, it could potentially compete with platforms like Steam Deck and Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Dream with me a bit here: imagine if a lot more games come to Mac, support Universal Purchase so that you only have to buy them once, and have cross-save functionality so that you can carry over your progress across Apple devices. That means that, if you’ve already bought into the Apple ecosystem, you could theoretically be able to play any of those games, whether you’re at your desk on your Mac or on your iPhone on the bus, and pick up right where you left off on whatever device you last played.
We’ll need to wait and see whether Apple has anything to say about any of this in tonight’s Scary Fast event, but it certainly seems a possibility.
Check out the trailer video below.
What are your thoughts? Could this really be the point at which Mac gaming gets serious? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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