I'm not planning on upgrading my 12 Pro Max as its good enough for what I do, however I'm not going to lie "console level" gaming on the new Pro's is a very interesting concept but I wonder how it is going to be executed.
First of all the big question is what are they going to do about file sizes? Most AAA console games in recent times clock in at northwards of 50GB per game with some far exceeding 100GB. Death Stranding a title announced in the text press release after the event on the base PS4 which is the weakest hardware it is designed to run on sits at 55GB. There are also Nintendo Switch games which are normally very stripped back visually that clock in over 20GB with NBA 2k23 sitting at 55GB.
With this in mind how are they going to get file sizes down enough to fit on a non user upgradable 128GB general purpose computing device which needs storage for other things too? I know reducing texture detail will help a lot here but surely not by a massive amount plus you need to keep the textures somewhat decent as the iPhone has a hi resolution screen and the potential to output video to a larger screen too which leads me onto another question.
On the presentation an end slide showed that the iPhone will be able to output upto 4K60 via USB-C suggesting the plethora of docks out there will work potentially allowing the iPhone to be like a Nintendo Switch. However if Apple nerf the video output like the non M series iPads whereby you get basic mirroring with no scaling then that will be as good as useless, so I wonder if maybe when connected via a dock if games are then able to take over the external screen fully allowing a fully immersive console like experience, which then goes back to my first question of how much can they get away with stripping out of the games if they can potentially be connected up to the big screen?
Finally there was no real mention of chip cooling, just a small slide and the line of how they redesigned the chassis to allow for cooler running.
Now as we all know gaming generates significant heat and even your 3nm chips will get toasty real quick so you have to wonder if Apple have put in some kind of vapour chamber cooling tech or something, but if they did why wouldn't they make a bigger deal out of this as cooling is a big selling point on devices nowadays.
I ask this one because my poor 12 Pro Max used to practically melt in seconds just playing the Microsoft XCloud beta, the screen would dim in about a minute or 2 and the phone started to feel uncomfortably warm and that was just streaming a video and sending control data back to a server with no heavy lifting on the device itself, it was so bad that i used it a couple of times and gave up on it.
If Apple haven't implemented decent cooling on the new iPhone 15 Pro's you may have console level gaming for about 5 minutes until it dims and throttles unless you live in the arctic and if customers have spent decent money on a "console level" game only for it to run well for a few minutes then Apple will be issuing a lot of App store refunds and potentially hardware refunds if it doesn't live up to the hype they gave it in the presentation.
So as impressive as it looks in the presentation and demos, I remain very sceptical as those are some big hurdles to jump to be a decent "console level" gaming device.
First of all the big question is what are they going to do about file sizes? Most AAA console games in recent times clock in at northwards of 50GB per game with some far exceeding 100GB. Death Stranding a title announced in the text press release after the event on the base PS4 which is the weakest hardware it is designed to run on sits at 55GB. There are also Nintendo Switch games which are normally very stripped back visually that clock in over 20GB with NBA 2k23 sitting at 55GB.
With this in mind how are they going to get file sizes down enough to fit on a non user upgradable 128GB general purpose computing device which needs storage for other things too? I know reducing texture detail will help a lot here but surely not by a massive amount plus you need to keep the textures somewhat decent as the iPhone has a hi resolution screen and the potential to output video to a larger screen too which leads me onto another question.
On the presentation an end slide showed that the iPhone will be able to output upto 4K60 via USB-C suggesting the plethora of docks out there will work potentially allowing the iPhone to be like a Nintendo Switch. However if Apple nerf the video output like the non M series iPads whereby you get basic mirroring with no scaling then that will be as good as useless, so I wonder if maybe when connected via a dock if games are then able to take over the external screen fully allowing a fully immersive console like experience, which then goes back to my first question of how much can they get away with stripping out of the games if they can potentially be connected up to the big screen?
Finally there was no real mention of chip cooling, just a small slide and the line of how they redesigned the chassis to allow for cooler running.
Now as we all know gaming generates significant heat and even your 3nm chips will get toasty real quick so you have to wonder if Apple have put in some kind of vapour chamber cooling tech or something, but if they did why wouldn't they make a bigger deal out of this as cooling is a big selling point on devices nowadays.
I ask this one because my poor 12 Pro Max used to practically melt in seconds just playing the Microsoft XCloud beta, the screen would dim in about a minute or 2 and the phone started to feel uncomfortably warm and that was just streaming a video and sending control data back to a server with no heavy lifting on the device itself, it was so bad that i used it a couple of times and gave up on it.
If Apple haven't implemented decent cooling on the new iPhone 15 Pro's you may have console level gaming for about 5 minutes until it dims and throttles unless you live in the arctic and if customers have spent decent money on a "console level" game only for it to run well for a few minutes then Apple will be issuing a lot of App store refunds and potentially hardware refunds if it doesn't live up to the hype they gave it in the presentation.
So as impressive as it looks in the presentation and demos, I remain very sceptical as those are some big hurdles to jump to be a decent "console level" gaming device.
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