Impressive on Mac, but iPhone 15 Pro struggles.
The promise is mouthwatering, especially on iOS: the full Death Stranding experience on portable, fanless devices.
The basic visual setup is convincing, with visual controls not too far from its PS4 counterpart.
Near-field detail is about the same between iPhone and PS4, while more distant LODs are sometimes simplified.
Foliage density and quality has also been tweaked.
Screen-space reflections are maintained on iPhone, though they do look a bit coarse.
Cutscenes are handled in a couple of ways with iPhone 15 Pro’s 19.5:1 aspect ratio.
Post-processing niceties like depth of field and motion blur are preserved here, which keeps the cinematics appropriately film-like.
iPhone users pay for those features by taking a hit in rendering resolution.
During more intense action moments, the game suffers from severe performance lows too.
General traversal is also hit with occasional stuttering, and some cutscenes also have issues.
Even on the rig though, you might observe frame-time inconsistencies during basic traversal.
Unfortunately, the touchscreen controls are fairly awful, with each regular controller button represented.
I think the most interesting place to start is by looking at Apple’s MetalFX upscalers.
In performance, these provide a definite win.
Image quality results are quite positive as well.
Death Stranding has a limited form of TAA that doesn’t give images a very thorough edge treatment.
MetalFX temporal is substantially less aliased, even when operating from one-quarter the internal resolution.
MetalFX Spatial is here too, but it’s best avoided.
It essentially looks like a much lower-res image, just sharpened and given an FSR 1-style image upscale.
In stills it can look passable, but in motion things do fall apart somewhat.
Overall, the performance feels very smooth.
I did note some dips from time to time during traversal, though these tended to be quite minor.
Overall, the performance figures are very solid, especially relative to what we saw on iPhone.
Summing up, Death Stranding on iPhone produces mixed results.
On Mac, though, it’s a different story.
