Like how Epic Games showed off its Unreal Engine running on mobile back in July, Battlefield 4 developer DICE has showed off its prowess on the mobile platform, as it has managed to get “parts” the Battlefield 3 sequel to run on iOS.
It’s generally considered that Battlefield 4 is a graphically intensive shooter, so its surprising to see the game’s Frostbite engine run on such a small device like an iPad tablet. DICE revealed its tech demo in a blog post published last week, with the pretense of intentionally trying to get the Frostbite engine to work in full on iOS.
“ Frostbite is known for being cutting edge, ” DICE’s Frostbite product owner Kristoffer Benjaminsson said in the blog post.
“ Everything from rendering to destruction to the scale of our worlds is constantly pushing the boundaries for video games. Highly detailed and dynamic environments are key pillars to any Frostbite game – and mobile is no difference.
Whatever you can do on console should be doable on mobile as well! ” he added.
Even though the Frostbite engine on mobile was already explored with Battlefield 4’s Companion App and with a tech demo of Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare running on an iPad Air, DICE wanted to see just how versatile the engine could be.
In the beginning, because of hardware and software limitations on iOS, the developer had to decide whether or not to scale down a few things; DICE could’ve either scaled down the number of objects visible at a given time keep up visual fidelity, or lower the fidelity itself to cope with a large number of objects.
Thankfully, with Apple’s recent introduction of Metal, the company’s new low-level graphics API, DICE was eventually able to make full use of the iOS hardware, allowing the studio to include both high visual fidelity and large amounts of objects.
Whilst the premise does look promising, Benjaminsson then firmly said that the tech demo was only to test out the Frostbite engine’s capabilities, and that nothing else will become of it: “ I want to stress that this has been a tech demo to test the engine capabilities, and nothing else, ” he said.
“ There is still much to do, but we’re very happy with the results so far, ” he then added. “ It’s a great feeling porting a system, get it running, and discover that there’s actually performance left. Even though we have much room for performance improvements on our end, we’re pleasantly surprised of the performance we’re getting from the hardware. ”
We’ll bring you more news on Battlefield 4 should further information reach our ears.
[ Frostbite ]