In a recent interview with IGNan Apple executive claimed that the iPhone 15 Pro was “will be the best game console.” I was skeptical; although Apple boasted the capabilities of its new GPU in its A17 Pro chip, and introduced high-fidelity games like Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4 remake a Death Stranding would all come to the iPhone 15 Pro, I didn’t believe they would work very well in practice.
But after actually seeing the footage Resident Evil Village in action on the iPhone 15 Pro makes me think that Apple’s vision is not as far off as I thought.
You can see the game in video by YouTuber Vincent Zhongstarting at 1:48 p.m. Zhang plays first Village on the 15 Pro on a mobile game controller attachment and the footage looks pretty decent. But then comes the good part: Zhang connects the phone to an external display and a DualSense controller, and at least in his video Resident Evil Village it looks closer than I expected to the graphical quality of the console game.
I don’t think it will be a 1-1 game. According to the captions in Zhang’s video, the game’s resolution is locked at 1560×720 and its framerate is “currently” locked at 30fps. And Zhang says the experience has its flaws: “The screen mirroring effect is definitely not as good as on the phone,” Zhang says. “Definitely not as good as the original game console effect.”
Still, I can see how connecting your phone to a monitor to stream console-quality games from your iPhone to the big screen might be appealing. It can be especially useful when you are traveling or away from home. We’ll have to wait and see how good the final versions of the iOS ports will be Village, RE4and Death Stranding indeed, they are—and if Apple can convince more developers to bring their console-quality games to the iPhone—but they’re much more interesting to me than last week.
The gaming push for the iPhone 15 Pro is part of a larger recent focus on high-end gaming from Apple. For example, he introduced a Proton-like tool for Macs that can run Windows games. Fingers crossed that it actually translates to more games that I can play on my MacBook Air, but while I wait, at least I’ll be able to give Baldur’s Gate 3 shot.
