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Frostbite gets "parts of Battlefield 4" running on iOS

"We're very happy with the results so far."

Frostbite has been trying to port Battlefield 4 to iOS as a tech demo to prove what it's capable of, and so far the engine developer seems pleased with its progress.

"To see exactly how far we could take the engine on mobile we set ourselves up for a real challenge: getting selected parts of the Battlefield 4 - truly a visually demanding game - running on iOS," explained Frostbite product manager Kristoffer Benjaminsson on the company's latest blog post.

"There is still much to do, but we're very happy with the results so far," he said. "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."

The developer explained that much of its recent breakthroughs were due to new hardware additions on Apple's end, notably a new low-level graphics API called Metal. "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.

Frostbite stressed that this is only a tech demo and won't be released as a full commercial port. It's not clear exactly what the developer means by "parts" here, but the following screens sure are impressive.