However, Capcom’s Resident Evil 7 fares better.
That said, it comes with somewhat muted expectations given the inconsistent technical quality of those prior iPhone releases.
There’s no other way to say it: Assassin’s Creed Mirage is substantially downgraded on iPhone.
Perhaps the most striking cutback is the huge reduction in asset quality.
Some lighting effects, like bloom and volumetrics, are toned down or absent on iPhone too.
Shadows aren’t quite as pin-sharp on iPhone either, though I think they hold up well enough.
This is a bit surprising, given how easy it is to hide pop-in on a mobile phone display.
I actually think the SSR looks a bit better on iPhone, as it resolves with much less flicker.
On consoles, it’s a more standard TAA technique.
It’s really just the massive reduction in texture quality that sticks out here.
Everything else is similar enough.
Then there’s image quality.
On iPhone, the internal resolution is extremely low.
I’m guessing it’s upscaling to something in the vicinity of 720p.
The biggest issue here comes down to artefacting around moving elements, like characters, which can be obtrusive.
In motion, the game often looks quite jagged and presents a lot of strange looking edge details.
But it has two other visual options as well: medium and low.
The primary difference between these modes comes down to draw distance.
Shadows are clearly a bit lower in resolution too.
It’s not a colossal difference, but it is noticeable in head-to-head comparisons.
The complexity of the water rendering also takes a hit as we scale back the mode parameters.
On the high preset, we get quite beautiful water with nice wave deformation and solid screen-space reflections.
So graphical quality is pretty decent - but what about performance?
The high preset tends to run very poorly.
We’re very often in the low to mid 20s here, with plenty of frame-time variation.
We do have a 30fps cap in place, but the game rarely reaches that target.
Dense city areas, like in Baghdad, are the worst affected.
The game isn’t unplayable, but it’s far from a smooth experience.
There’s definitely some substantial slowdown in the mix at times but it’s an OK experience overall.
Baghdad does present some extra strain though, and the game can hover in the mid-20s for extended periods.
It’s still often at 30fps though, or at least close to it.
Meanwhile, the medium preset falls somewhere in between, though it’s usually closer to the high preset.
The performance level is at least acceptablesomeof the time.
To be fair to the iPhone code, the One S version also suffers from extended sub-30fps bouts.
There are other performance issues though.
During this period though, the game will pause.
These pauses really take you out of the experience and pop up frequently when traversing city areas.
I noticed some glitches too, with broken pathfinding and animation issues.
All things considered, Mirage isn’t quite what I’d like it to be.
Less complex games seem like a better fit for Apple’s 2023 flagship phone.
It generally looks just fine on an iPhone display though.
More surprising, though, is the game’s performance level with the balanced preset.
Controls do feel a little laggy regardless, but this is still a big upgrade.
RE7 looks great and features excellent materials and lighting, but has very constrained environments relative to those games.
In any case, RE7 seems like a better fit for the iPhone than titles like AC Mirage.
Other more conservative last-gen titles, like Alien Isolation and Wreckfest, also work pretty well.
