Summary
Summary
- Flagship iPhones can run AAA games natively, with RDR2 and Cyberpunk demos running locally, not via cloud.
- The RDR2 port is glitchy and experimental, but Cyberpunk Arm64 on iPhone 17 Pro hits ~39 FPS and looks playable.
- Mobile ports and emulation are becoming serious; phones might reduce the need for dedicated consoles. Flagship phones are now capable of running some of the most demanding AAA games. Users on X (Twitter) have shared footage showing games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 running on the latest iPhone models. What makes these demos impressive is that they do not involve cloud gaming or remote access to a gaming PC; the games run locally on Apple’s phone chips. Of course, neither of the examples gives you a simple App Store download, and performance is not always guaranteed with these unofficial ports. That said, seeing full desktop games launch on phones at all makes the idea of buying a dedicated console feel somewhat less inevitable in the future. These iPhone “ports” are impressive, and genuinely playable in some cases Cyberpunk 2077 is the most promising demo A few days ago, we saw a rough rendition of RDR2 running natively on an iPhone 18 Pro, thanks to Madeira’s demonstration on X. Rather than serving as a fully functioning gaming demo, it was intended to showcase how its custom runtime translates the Windows game’s DirectX 12 graphics calls to Apple’s Metal API and uses DXMT’s airconv for Shader Model 5 conversion. That’s a very impressive technical achievement, but nobody will mistake the result for the console version. Most of the objects and assets on the screen have a hard time rendering without glitching or disappearing. Also, the frame rate fluctuates a lot, and the game sometimes feels like you’re watching a cursed slideshow of RDR2 rather than a walkthrough. Madeira itself calls this an experimental build. Cyberpunk 2077 on an iPhone 17 Pro, however, is another story. Instead of translating an x86 Windows executable file, this demo reportedly runs the Arm64 Mac build directly through Metal. The performance overlay hovers around 39 FPS during part of the footage, with the camera movement and gameplay looking remarkably smooth. This is about as close as an unofficial phone port can come to resembling an official release. You can watch the footage in the embedded X post above. Can mobile gaming ever be taken seriously? For years, searching for console games on phones would often lead to a clickbait YouTube video or a cheaply-made clone on the App Store pretending to be GTA, Resident Evil, or Assassin’s Creed. At the other extreme were usually technical stunts. Like the many ridiculous devices people have made to run Doom, most of the demos were built primarily to prove that it could be done. However, this seems to be changing quickly. Emulators (and even official releases) are becoming more and more common these days. Android phones can now run just about any PS3 game through an emulator, and we even managed to get GTA 5 running on Android at a consistent 60 FPS. Sure, the touchscreen is not necessarily the most comfortable controller, and there are still inconsistencies in compatibility, which are expected from unofficial ports. That said, these mobile ports are gradually turning into serious projects rather than internet parlor tricks. As the hardware improves and the setup becomes accessible to ordinary users, it will only become more commonplace to see AAA games on phones. Who knows? Maybe this could eventually make dedicated gaming setups obsolete in the future!