Frostbite tech demo gets "selected parts" of Battlefield 4 running on iOS

EA has been playing around with optimizing Frostbite for iOS, and it appears to be going rather well considering parts of Battlefield 4 are now running on operating system.

While it's only a tech demo, and the game will not be released as a port on iOS systems, it looks rather nice going by the screenshots.

"It has been quite a challenge," said Kristoffer Benjaminsson, product owner for mobile at Frostbite. "To handle dynamic features such as destruction or moving light sources, most things in the Frostbite engine happen in realtime. This puts extra demand on performance to be able to deliver large, highly detailed worlds with superb visual quality.

"We were making great progress feature-wise, but hardware and software limitations forced us to either scale down the number of objects and their complexity to retain visual fidelity, or accept lower visual fidelity to cope with a larger number of objects.

"This all changed when Apple introduced Metal, their new low-level graphics API, which allowed us to make full use of the hardware. Together with the latest range of hardware, Metal has created possibilities previously out of reach and for the first time we can include both high visual fidelity and a large number of objects."

Benjaminsson said getting selected parts of Battlefield 4 running on iOS was a great way to test the engine capabilities.

"I want to stress that this has been a tech demo, and nothing else," he added. "There is still much to do, but we’re very happy with the results so far. 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.:

You can read the entire blog post over on the Frostbite Blog.

Via Eurogamer.