The team behind the Frostbite game engine is testing Battlefield 4 out on iOS, and it’s been surprisingly successful so far.
EA made the announcement via the Frostbite blog, outlining the impressive feat of pushing a visually demanding game onto a mobile device.
Kristoffer Benjaminsson, Product Owner Mobile at Frostbite Stockholm, said: “Whatever you can do on console should be doable on mobile as well!”
According to Benjaminsson, running the game on iOS is only possible thanks to the addition of Apple’s new Metal graphics API.
“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,” he said.
Benjaminsson has stressed that the Frostbite team hasn’t tested the entirety of the game just yet, only a few parts to see what the engine is capable of.
“To see exactly how far we could take the engine on mobile we set ourselves up for a real challenge: getting selected parts of Battlefield 4 running on iOS,” explained Benjaminsson.
“There is still much to do, but we’re very happy with the results so far,” he revealed. “It’s a great feeling porting a system, get it running, and discover that there’s actually performance left.”
“Even though we have much room for performance improvements on our end, we’re pleasantly surprised of the performance we’re getting from the hardware.”
While this by no means signals a definitive release of Battlefield 4 on iOS, it's at least a good sign that high-end graphics can be squeezed out of Apple fare for future titles.
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