Great news: the new iPhone 6S series is set to get a major RAM upgrade. The previous version had 1GB, the new one gets double the fun: 2GB!
The only other iOS device with that much RAM is the iPad Air 2. After using one of these as my primary computer for the past year, I can vouch for the difference: 2GB of RAM is a huge upgrade. Webpages don’t close as much, apps don’t crash as much. Great stuff.
Even bigger, the new 13-inch iPad Pro is set to receive even more RAM: 4GB, according to Adobe. This massive boost in RAM might be overkill, but hey, after years of the iPad being RAM starved, overkill is a welcome change of pace.
This week just keeps getting better! After yesterday’s cavalcade of news, Gamevice has one more big announcement to add: The Gamevice for iPhone will be coming in the next few months!
Much like the excellent iPad Gamevice, the iPhone Gamevice uses a classic plus-shaped d-pad, and features two real analog sticks positioned above the ABXY buttons. Circle pad / analog nub haters have nothing to worry about here: the Gamevice uses REAL console-grade analog sticks.
The Gamevice for iPhone uses a smart-cover-style folding rubber piece in the middle to hold it’s two halves together, rather than the single-piece bendable rubber of the larger Gamevice. This means that the same exact Gamevice can work with both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus – no need to lock yourself into one or the other. The newly announced iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus are also fully supported, of course.
Much like the recently revealed Nimbus controller, the Gamevice for iPhone charges over Lightning, rather than the Micro USB connection used by the larger Gamevice. It seems like Apple’s MFi spec has changed to accommodate Lightning charging in controllers, which should be welcome for people who otherwise wouldn’t need a Micro USB cable.
I had a chance to hold a very early prototype of the Gamevice for iPhone a long time ago, back at CES. It wasn’t actually connected to anything, so I can’t make any judgements on how well it plays, but I can vouch for the fact that the layout felt comfortable. Separating the two halves via a folding bridge works as well as you would hope. It’s a clever move, and it makes for a potentially more future-proof design than the larger Gamevice.
The Gamevice for iPhone goes on sale within the next few months for the same $99 price as the larger iPad model. I expect we’ll hear a lot more about this controller in the near future, as release approaches. Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on one. If this controller is even half as good as their iPad model, we’re in for a real treat.
The Gamevice for iPad Air also gets a firm release date: October 2015 – next month! If you’ve been looking forward to the iPad Air model, the wait is nearly over.
I’ll have an extensive review of this Gamevice, as well as the other Gamevice models, as soon as possible.
Anandtech did some digging and discovered that the GPU in the iPad Air 2 is a customized 8-core design, rather than the 6 core generally assumed.
Ryan Smith at Anandtech says:
Since publishing our initial iPad Air 2 review last week, a few new pieces of information have come in that have changed our perspective on Appleâs latest SoC. As it turns out I was wrong. Powered by what weâre going to call the GXA6850, the A8Xâs GPU is even better than I thought.
[…] By drawing outside of the lines and building an eight cluster GPU configuration where none previously existed, the A8X and its GXA6850 GPU are more powerful than even we first suspected. Apple traditionally aims high with its SoCs, but this ended up being higher still.
In a nutshell, the A8X features two of the GPUs used by the standard A8 chip in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Putting it another way, it features two GPUs that are noticeably better than the one GPU used in the first iPad Air, and all iPad Minis.
The screen on the iPad is about 3 megapixels, compared with 2 megapixels on the iPhone 6 Plus and 1 megapixel on the standard iPhone 6. This creates an interesting situation where games running at full resolution on the iPad Air 2 perform about 50% better than on the iPhone 6 Plus and about 50% worse than on the regular iPhone 6; I’ve gone into detail about how and why this is before, and will continue to examine gaming performance on Apple’s devices.
Hot on the heels of the recent MOGA Rebel MFi controller release, high-end gaming accessory maker Mad Catz has finally begun taking preorders for their own full Bluetooth MFi controller, the C.T.R.L.i, for an early October release, at a price of $59!
The C.T.R.L.i is a long-anticipated entry to the market, and seems likely to be the second full-size Bluetooth MFi controller available. Similarly to the MOGA Rebel, this is a full size console-style controller with an Xbox style staggered joystick layout, fully analog buttons and triggers, and wireless Bluetooth connectivity.
Similar to the MOGA Rebel, the Mad Catz C.T.R.L.i includes a mounting solution for an iPhone, this time in the form of a sturdy-feeling grip that screws security in to the back of the controller. The grip should be large enough to support the new iPhone 6 designs, including the 5.5 inch iPhone 6 Plus. Unlike the Rebel, the C.T.R.L.i does NOT include a rechargeable battery, and instead relies on non-Apple-standard AAA batteries.
I happen to own the PC equivalent of this controller, the C.T.R.L.r, and while this iOS version will be different is several key ways, I can confirm that the build quality of the controller is outstanding. Absolutely first-rate, up to the caliber of the last generation first-party console controllers. Unfortunately, the buttons, d-pad, and analog sticks are another story, and all have serious problems. However, as these have all been completely replaced for this iOS version, I’m withholding judgement until I can get access to the real C.T.R.L.i – you can expect a review as soon as possible, as well as a full comparison to the MOGA Rebel.
Sadly, Mad Catz seems to have picked a bad time to release the C.T.R.L.i, coming right on the heels of an iOS update that kills Bluetooth MFi compatibility with a large amount of games that were previously compatible under iOS7. With any luck, Apple will fix this issue before the C.T.R.L.i ships in October. The other benefit to waiting is that you’ll have access to the alternate controller colors, rather than being stuck with black, which is the only option you can preorder.
Sadly, the full color range is not currently available – hope you like black
At $59, this Mad Catz controller undercuts all of it’s competitors. If Mad Catz can keep the build quality up here, there is a very good chance that this will wind up being the best MFi controller available this year. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one and writing a review.
Customers in the United States and Canada can pre-order from the American Mad Catz store. European customers can order from the European Mad Catz store. Presumably, the C.T.R.L.i will find its way into Apple Stores before long.
What Apple’s latest and greatest flagships mean for gaming
The new iPhone’s are upon us. And with over 4 million people preordering the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, chances are strong that a lot of you are planning on gaming on one of these.
While these new iPhones are undoubtably huge improvements over the iPhone 5 and earlier devices, the story is a little different when compared with the iPhone 5S. Unfortunately, gamers who are expecting a wholesale performance upgrade over last year’s model might be disappointed.
Before I go on, a disclaimer: nobody actually has either of the new iPhones yet. Nobody has benchmarked either of these phones, let alone gamed on them. The following is speculative, based on information from Apple, and from accurate sounding predictions from AnandTech.
With that said, lets examine the potential gaming performance of the new iPhones.
Resolution Determines Performance
Before digging into the specific details of the newer iPhones, understand that in most cases (certainly this one), the single biggest contributor to gaming performance is the number of pixels rendered. Pixels are rendered by the GPU – the graphics engine built in to the computer chip. Importantly, the performance cost associated with rendering additional pixels scales relatively linearly with the performance of the GPU – a GPU with twice the performance can render twice as many pixels at the same cost.
In terms of performance, today’s screens are limited to 60 frames per second – sixty pictures rendered by the GPU and displayed by the screen per second. The more complex the graphics being rendered – think shadows, lighting, textures – the harder it is to create 60 FPS graphics at a given resolution. But conversely, the lower the screen resolution – the fewer pixels the GPU needs to render – the more complex graphics that are possible while maintaining 60 FPS performance.
Ideally, this means that developers would start with the constraints of rendering 60 FPS at whatever the maximum resolution possible is, then implement graphics, shaders, and lighting to stay within those limits. In reality, developers cheat. They often render at reduced frame rates and lower resolutions in order to use more complex shaders and graphics. This is because games are so often sold on screenshots, where resolution and framerate aren’t relevant. It’s also used when games have to run on multiple platforms with a performance discrepancy – the same games on the Xbox One have reduced framerate and/or resolution compared with the PS4, because the GPU in the Xbox is weaker.
But what does this have to do with the new iPhones? Well…
Bigger Phones, More Pixels
Both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus don’t just feature bigger screens than the iPhone 5S; they also feature more pixels in those screens. The iPhone 5S sports a 1136×640 pixel screen, meaning the GPU in it’s A7 processor needs to render 727,040 pixels a total of 60 times per second in order to provide fluid gameplay at full resolution.
Along with it’s larger screen, the iPhone 6 features a 1334×750 pixel screen, translating to about a million pixels – about a quarter more pixels than the screen in the previous iPhone 5S.
The iPhone 6 Plus features a full 1920×1080 (known as 1080p) pixel screen – about 2 million pixels. This beautiful, high-resolution screen looks as good as it does because it packs over twice as many pixels into it’s screen as the already-larger iPhone 6, and almost three times as many as the previously-flagship iPhone 5S!
If we look at these numbers another way, the 1-megapixel screen of the iPhone 6 is about 140% the pixels of the iPhone 5’s screen (727,040*140%=1,017,856 â close enough). That means that the GPU inside the iPhone 6 would need to be 40% more powerful than the one in the iPhone 5S to exhibit the same level of performance while rendering additional pixels.
The iPhone 6 Plus, on the other hand, has even more work to do. It’s 2-megapixel screen is about 275% the pixels of the screen on the iPhone 5S, meaning the GPU would need to be an additional 175% more powerful – an almost 3X increase!
The question now becomes: is the new GPU up to the task?
Enter the A8 GPU
Details about the GPU in Apple’s new A8 processor are currently scarce, though this is likely to change as soon as the new iPhones are out in the wild. What we do have are Apple’s numbers. Apple claims a 50% improvement in GPU performance compared to the A7. Anandtech suggests this improvement is likely due to adding two more cores to the previous 4-core design, and is also likely being a bit under-represented by Apple (real-world improvement will probably be a little greater due to improved components). But lets take that 50% improvement as a starting point.
The smaller iPhone 6 model required about a 40% GPU improvement to perform as well as the iPhone 5S at the new resolution. With it’s 50% performance improvement, the A8 GPU seems more than capable of covering that. Expect games on the iPhone 6 to perform noticeably better than they did on the iPhone 5S.
The iPhone 6 Plus is another story. It required a full 175% performance gain in order to run games as well as the iPhone 5S at full resolution, and the A8 GPU seems woefully underqualified to provide that boost.
Caveats
I’d like to make a few things very clear. People who know a lot about GPU design are probably mashing their heads into their keyboards right now at all the oversimplifications I’ve made, and I don’t blame them. The fact is, resolution scaling is not entirely linear – most GPUs have optimizations allowing them to reach higher resolutions without needing a strictly corresponding performance increase. Also, I’ve oversimplified some of the numbers anyways. Also, most importantly, none of this is based on any real-world testing of the new iPhones. Until people actually dissect these new devices, this is all wild conjecture, and should be taken as such.
What This Means for Gaming
As many caveats as there are, we can still make a few ballpark-estimates from this data:
The iPhone 6 will perform better than the iPhone 5S, but the improvement won’t be massive.
The iPhone 6 Plus will run worse than both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 5S – perhaps as much as half the performance as the regular iPhone 6.
Luckily for gamers, developers already have experience dealing with this type of situation. Almost identical problems are at play when it comes to making cross-platform console games that scale down from the PS4 to the Xbox One to the previous-generation consoles. Similarly, iOS developers already have experience with this problem, due to the fact that the iPad faces exactly the same issues – same GPU as the iPhone, way more pixels to render. Expect developers to take advantage of the following compensation techniques on the iPhone 6 Plus:
Dropping the rendering resolution
Dropping the framerate, perhaps down to 30fps
Reducing some on-screen effects and shaders
Those are the tricks generally used to compensate for discrepancy in hardware, and I’d expect to see developers take advantage of some combination of them as they target the iPhone 6 Plus, when necessary.
Conclusion
This article should be taken for exactly what it is – technical discussion and speculation based on assumptions about hardware that isn’t available yet. To reiterate, it is still too soon to know exactly what the performance differences between the various iPhones will be.
This article is in no way meant to imply that the iPhone 6 Plus won’t play games well. The various methods to compensate for resolution differences listed above may or may not be noticeable to most gamers. The trade-off of having a giant screen will probably be worth it for those interested in the iPhone 6 Plus. The iPhone 6 will have a better time rendering full-resolution at 60fps than any other iOS device. Gamers who find that important will want to keep it in mind.
Finally, for those considering upgrading: the iPhone 6 will not run games significantly better than the iPhone 5S, but it will likely be a noticeable improvement over the iPhone 5, and a massive improvement over anything earlier. If you’re upgrading from anything less than the iPhone 5S, expect a much better gaming experience.
For iPhone 5S gamers, the story is more difficult. The iPhone 6 Plus is, on paper, a downgrade for gaming, at least at full-resolution 60fps.
The big screens of the new iPhones offer some amazing benefits for usability and immersion, but it’s important to understand the costs associated with those gains before deciding whether or not to upgrade, and which model to upgrade to.
Personally, I’ll be looking forward to getting my hands on both of them, and am preparing to test each exhaustively. This will be a lot more productive than theoretical benchmarks – expect to see another article soon about the actual experience of gaming on these devices.
TouchArcade goes full hands-on with the Upcoming Moga Rebel controller, and provides a great video and some interesting impressions of using the controller.
Jared from TouchArcade says:
As you can see, the Rebel mostly resembles an Xbox controller, with its offset dual-analog sticks and button arrangement. In terms of build quality the Rebel feels quite solid, though it still doesn’t feel as solid as an actual 1st-party controller from an Xbox or PlayStation. It feels lighter than either of those, and has more of a plasticky feel, but it still feels like a well-built piece of equipment. The buttons have a nice clicky feel, and the L and R analog triggers feel especially good in terms of resistance and springiness. The two analog sticks also feel great, though they’re a bit looser than I prefer.
[…] Overall, my impressions after yesterday’s demo and my own time playing around with a review unit last night is that this is far and away the best full-sized MFi controller on market. Now, there’s not a ton of competition in that area, and there are a few negatives to the Rebel. Obviously pricing is an issue as it is with every MFi controller, and at $79.99, while the Rebel definitely does feel like a well-built piece of hardware, it still doesn’t feel like something that costs $79.99. Also, as much as I love the flip-out arm to hold my device, it doesn’t flip all the way back, and the angle at which it stops feels a bit too forward for my taste. That’s a very minor problem though, and one I’m quickly getting used to.
Lots to digest here. Seems like while the Rebel isn’t perfect, it should come the closest of any so far to fulfilling most people’s needs in an MFi controller.
Also noteworthy is the impressions of the Moga World App, which should be launching alongside the Rebel. The app provides a limited catalog of MFi controller compatible games, shows an overview of button layout and sensitivity, and should allow for firmware updates in the future to improve the Rebel controller.
Razer has done something similar for their upcoming Junglecat, with the notable addition of allowing for customizable button sensitivity. Here’s hoping MOGA incorporates something like that as well.
I’ll be posting my own impressions of the Rebel as soon the review unit gets here, and I’m planning on getting and exhaustive review up as soon as possible. Stay tuned.
