When Jared got his hands on the iPhone 6 Plus after the keynote, the games installed on it were fairly limited, leaving much up to the imagination on how high-end games would run on the device. I’ve spent some time playing a few recent games on it, and overall I’m pretty impressed. Most of what makes the iPhone 6 Plus awesome to game on is its increased size, as the performance and graphical fidelity improvement feels a lot like previous iPhone iterations- Stuff seems to run and look a little better, but, it’s not like there’s any massive night and day difference. The iPhone 5S still is a killer piece of kit, and until developers start building things for the iPhone’s A8 processor and the 6/6 Plus screen sizes, I’m not sure there will be too many jaw-dropping demos.
There’s also a few technical hurdles that make showing off these games a little weird. First off, there’s the scaling “issue" (massive air quotes there as I’m not sure how much of an issue it even is). The iPhone 6/6S renders everything 3x internally, then downsamples for display. This means screenshots are 2208×1242 instead of 1920×1080, which only serves to further obscure how these games actually look on the device. When you look at the screenshots here, particularly of the 3D games, they look like a blurry mess… But when you are looking at that same image at the pixel density of the iPhone 6 Plus, it looks nuts. I really don’t know the best way to reconcile all that.
Additionally, it seems very obvious that some of these games aren’t at all optimized for the new devices. It’s understandable, and you can hardly fault developers for having games that run a little weird on hardware they weren’t able to test on yet. Both Modern Combat 5 (Free) and Zen Garden (Free) suffer from similar stuttering issues when it’s obvious that the game is loading something. For instance, when switching areas in Zen Garden, you’ll have a pretty huge frame drop and then everything will be back to normal. MC5 is similar. It’s nothing that is game breaking, but, it’s there none the less.
MC5 has some other weird issues as well, like the sky will flicker at random. I’m sure that these sorts of things merely require minor tweaks to get working, and it wouldn’t surprise me if developers were quick to release updates to address these unforseen problems. Like every year when a new iOS and hardware hits, there’s loads of growing pains to be expected.
In a nutshell, everything we speculated in previous posts about gaming on the larger screen of the iPhone XXL turned out to be true. It is a killer size for gaming. The big screen is incredibly dramatic in your hands, and with virtual controls it seems to strike a pretty perfect balance between having the screen totally obscured by your thumbs on the smaller iPhones to feeling like you need to weirdly stretch your thumbs to the corners of the iPad screen.
Even though there’s all kinds of zany scaling going on under the hood, games that use pixel art still manage to look really crisp, which just goes to show how great the algorithms used to do all of this are. Typically when you’re scaling anything that has hard pixel edges, the first thing that happens is those start to blur as you begin to go up and down in size. Not the case here.
Oh, and it seems like the speaker volume in the iPhone 6 Plus got a hefty boost over what the iPhone 5S was capable of. It feels like ~60% volume on the iPhone 6 Plus is the rough equivalent to the 100% volume of the iPhone 5S. It’s plenty loud to annoy everyone around you with whatever game you’re playing.
My first impressions are incredibly positive with all this, as basically all of my suspicions were confirmed when it comes to gaming on the 6 Plus. While it might not fit in your pocket too well, in your hands it’s amazing. I’ve yet to have time to do any serious battery stress testing yet, but playing through a bunch of games to write this up hasn’t even put a dent in the amount of juice onboard the 6 Plus.
I’m anxious to see what developers think of these new devices once they get them in their hands and begin tweaking their existing games to run better on them. All of the screenshots embedded here link out to the actual full size version, saved as JPEG in the highest quality possible. Stay tuned for more posts on the new hardware over the coming weeks as we start testing out inevitable iPhone 6/6 Plus updates that hit the App Store.
