Gadgetory

I was playing through Telltale's Game of Thrones on my phone when it hit me this is a full console game in my pocket that got me thinking how far away are our phones from consoles anyway after nine years of tech evolution the iPhone six-plus can actually hang with the xbox360 while using orders of magnitude less power on paper the 360 has the advantage but it's closer than it seems thanks to the older PowerPC CPU design and DirectX 9 era graphics bring the iPad air 2 in the picture and you'll see it has the same amount of cores quadruple the memory and a beefy GPU they can outperform the xenos inside the xbox of course specs are one thing but there's no substitute for actual gameplay to make things a bit more fair we're going to connect the iPhone to a TV using the lightning to HDMI adapter and use the MOCA rebel controller to get some actual physical controls iOS and supported controller since iOS 7 and they make a big difference for games like first-person shooters so let's play a few games and see if you guys can figure out which ones are from the iPhone and which are running on the Xbox the Robb Stark King in the north all right so do you have your guesses well the answer is actually all the games are running on the iPhone now if that tripped you up you're not the only one as the line between console and mobile gaming has definitely been blurring lately Telltale's Game of Thrones is essentially the same game on both the iPhone and Xbox so it's a good comparison between the pair if you pixel peep you'll notice some subtle upgrades like higher res textures and smoother anti-aliasing on the 360 but it really isn't a huge difference move over to the original BioShock and you'll notice a bigger change although again you're getting an actual port not a watered-down version of the game the biggest concession here is a much lower resolution which while it makes sense on a smaller screen is still disappointing along with the pared down graphics options arguably more important than the Hardware differences is that developers have had nearly 10 years to optimize games for the Xbox whereas there's a new iPhone every year that's where metal comes in like mantle gl next and DirectX 12 Apple has metal which is a lower-level API to let developers really dig in to the a7 and a8 to get more performance the best example of this is epic Zen garden a graphics demo with Unreal Engine 4 that looks great period not even considering that this is running on a phone modern combat 5 also takes advantage of metal and while it's not quite as nice looking it's still a decent step forward for mobile gaming the iPhone might not quite be able to match a console like for 360 but it is very very close if things keep moving at this rate the Xbox one and ps4 better watch out you