Frostbite is known for being cutting edge. Everything from rendering to destruction to the scale of our worlds is constantly pushing the boundaries for video games. Highly detailed and dynamic environments are key pillars to any Frostbite game – and mobile is no difference. Whatever you can do on console should be doable on mobile as well!
The Frostbite engine has already explored mobile gaming with the Battlefield 4 Commander App, and at the Apple WWDC event earlier this year we showcased a Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare tech demo running on an iPad Air. 1.3 million triangles showing up on screen simultaneously showed what the engine was capable of.
The next step? We wanted to get parts of Battlefield 4 running on iOS.
It has been quite a challenge. To handle dynamic features such as destruction or moving light sources, most things in the Frostbite engine happen in realtime. This puts extra demand on performance to be able to deliver large, highly detailed worlds with superb visual quality. We were making great progress feature-wise, but hardware and software limitations forced us to either scale down the number of objects and their complexity to retain visual fidelity, or accept lower visual fidelity to cope with a larger number of objects.
This all changed when Apple introduced Metal, their new low-level graphics API, which allowed us to make full use of the hardware. Together with the latest range of hardware, Metal has created possibilities previously out of reach and for the first time we can include both high visual fidelity and a large number of objects.
More in the full post. Cool stuff. Wise company move to look to Apple's ecosystem. Nice testimonial for the merits of Metal, too. It reads like Apple wrote it.
The new iPad is pretty much a portable console. It pretty much has near PS4 graphics
I won't go that far, but it is pretty cool to see the big engine builders going after iOS (rightfully so).
It's pretty amazing to see how much Metal affects the ability of my iPhone 6 to play games. Asphalt 8 looks great, runs great, and seems to be about as taxing on my battery as browsing the web. It's fun to play for a long time and to look at how little it impacts battery life. I'm routinely at ~30-40% battery life after nearly 8 hours of usage with a significant portion of that time devoted to games.
EDIT: These anecdotal experiences also backup the idea that Apple crafted the iPhone 6 to be a high performer for longer stretches of time. Pretty awesome engineering.
Hi there! Now this great news for iOS gamers! Recent innovations by Apple have indeed opened the door for the development of amazing near console quality titles and Battlefield 4 is definitely one of these. The screenshots are stunning, but a trailer would have been even better! Is the release date for this gem of game known yet please?
Battlefield 4 is not coming to iOS. This was just a tech demo showing select BF4 assets from Frostbite Engine running on iOS.
The PowerVR 6XT GPU's used by Apple in their A8 and A8X do NOT offer support for OpenGL 4.4 / DirectX 11 (or equivalent features), so Battlefield 4 could not actually run on any current iOS hardware.
that would be great to see. tablets are taking over pretty much. I wouldn't be surprised if the next console was a souped up tablet that could be plugged into the tv
Log in to comment