Published , by Andrew Yoon
Published , by Andrew Yoon
So, how much can the iPhone 5S handle? Quite a lot. While every generation of iPhone offers a boost in performance, Infinity Blade 3 creative director Donald Mustard said that the leap made for the 5S is "shocking."
In fact, according to Mustard, the dragon featured in the game's debut trailer is more complex than any character they've created before. "That dragon had four times the polycount of any console character we've ever done in Gears of War or Shadow Complex or anything like that," he said. "It had four times the texture detail, the normal map detail, all on that dragon."
"And that dragon was blowing thousands of particles into the screen, which has this huge fill rate, right? It's very traffic [intensive] for the CPU and GPU. And then we were able to blur those particles. We were able to... balloon those particles, and then add motion blur to them. And then add high-res shadows to the dragon, passing on itself--while doing fullscreen anti-aliasing," Mustard told Polygon, ranting about the capabilities of Apple's upcoming phone. "And then, on top of that, do a fullscreen color adjust and vignette pass, where it kind of adjusts the contrast and the color of the screen, and then also add distortion--the distortion of the flames and stuff."
That kind of performance is staggering, especially when one considers it's a mobile device. However, early benchmarks show that the 5S truly is a significant leap over its predecessor. Even without any optimization for the 5S or support for OpenGL ES 3.0, performance almost doubles what the iPhone 5 could handle. That should be exciting news for mobile gamers eagerly awaiting Apple's next phone.