What the iPhone 4S Can Do for Games
Apple announced a new model in its iPhone device series today that boasts the iPad 2’s A5 chip and dual-core graphics. The iPhone 4S means faster games with better graphics, a sequel to top-grossing iOS game Infinity Blade, and bad news for handheld console makers like Nintendo and Sony.
The current generation of handheld console includes Nintendo’s DS family (the most recent of which being the 3DS) and Sony’s PlayStation Portable family, with the upcoming PlayStation Vita being the newest. In the past two years, Apple has largely caught up to what the DS and PSP could do with games on a basic interaction level with support for synchronous multiplayer experiences and enhanced processing power that brought us game genres like first-person shooting and racing. The iPhone graphics trailed handheld consoles slightly, depending on which engine the developer chose to build their games, but today Apple says that the iPhone 4S will be able to graphics “that aren’t even available on home gaming consoles.”
The demo for this point was Infinity Blade 2 — a sequel to Chair Entertainment’s top-grossing iOS title. The original game leveraged the Unreal Engine 3 on iPhones for a graphically rich gameplay experience. When brought to iPad, the developer was able to introduce new textures to the game for an even better visual experience. Now, for the sequel, the developer is able to bring the same level of visual fidelity to iPhones — and increase the size of the game itself.
October 5th, 2011 at 9:21 am
As a clarification to what sounds like an exaggerated claim in this article, the full quote from Apple (according to multiple sources on a Google search, including and Engadget live blog) was “We’re going to show you some graphics techniques that aren’t even available on home gaming consoles.”
In other words, they aren’t claiming that the 4GS can out-perform the PS3, but rather that it has certain techniques that just weren’t around when the PS3 was developed, likely some pixel shaders or tessellation geometry or something along those lines.
October 9th, 2011 at 9:36 am
[...] What the iPhone 4S Can Do for Games [...]