The triple-A PC and console game ported to iPhone 15 Pro.
Is this a genuinely good experience, or do the mobile concessions simply cut too deep?
Village is, bar none, the best-looking mobile title I’ve ever seen.
The most important selection here is MetalFX Upscaling, a Apple’s own temporal upscaler that produces DLSS-like results.
Compared to native res rendering, it produces a clean and detailed, if slightly soft, final image.
Performance is interesting here.
On Macs, we saw frame-rates increase by around 70 percent instead, with a more conservative upscale factor.
The other image quality selections aren’t nearly as robust.
It’s just an image quality disaster.
Expect a modest, though appreciable, 25 percent performance improvement relative to native rendering.
Again, I think MetalFX quality is the better option.
don’t have much effect on performance.
With all three dialed to their maximum values, the game crashes within 30 seconds of play.
Finally, there’s one set of visual options that is conspicuously absent: ray tracing.
Despite the A17 Pro’s hardware RT acceleration, Capcom hasn’t delivered any in-game RT here.
With that in mind, I’d recommend sticking to the mix of prefs as a starting point.
Unfortunately, even with these slightly optimised controls, Village suffers from poor performance on the iPhone 15 Pro.
Engaging a 30fps cap produces better behaviour, but frame-pacing challenges remain.
We also have a 2021 M1-based iPad Pro, which should offer substantially more fluidity.
The iPad is still clocking a pretty decent performance win here, but it’s not transformative.
And while CPU-bound performance looks sort of okay here, later areas do stress the system much harder.
Beyond basic parameters and performance metrics, how does Village actually work on iPhone?
The first horror you’ll have to contend with is the game’s touchscreen-based control configuration.
The game is technically playable, but far from pleasant.
Ultimately, Resident Evil Village is a compelling proof-of-concept for high-end iPhone gaming.
Capcom has delivered a playable, visually-superb version of a technically-advanced and big-budget game on a tiny mobile rig.
On the other hand, it’s a hard game to actually recommend playing on an iPhone.
Performance is compromised with frequent frame-time spikes and punctuated occasionally by severe bouts of stutter.
The touchscreen controls are awful and external gamepads suffer from high input latency.
The prefs menu is overly complex and hard to navigate, with some options even causing app crashes too.
