Apple’s iPhones are finally getting a feature that the best Android phones have had for years, all thanks to the recently unveiled iOS 18 – and that feature is Game Mode.
While the Game Center in iOS provided things like cloud-synced storage and an avatar, it’s quite limited in terms of specific gaming features at the moment. By comparison, dedicated gaming modes found on the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S24 and OnePlus 12 can do things like mute notifications and boost performance to run mobile games that can make the graphics quite heavy on the go.
Unveiled at WWDC 2024 – be sure to check out our WWDC 2024 live blog for the latest announcements – Game Mode in iOS 18 will emulate a number of game modes found on competing Android phones, by slowing down things like background activity to allow more processing power to go to games to be piped.
While the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max have access to the already powerful A17 pro chip, Game Mode should help your phone squeeze more power from the silicon to run demanding games like the iOS version of Death Stranding. turn.
Likewise, this mode could help optimize the power of older iPhones, which might struggle a bit when it comes to running games on iOS 17.
This all ties in nicely with Apple’s continued buildout of Apple Arcade and its efforts to bring demanding console games to its mobile devices. Add to that the pretty neat controller support that iPhones offer, especially with the PS5 DualSense controller, and iOS starts to feel like a platform that can be used for some pretty serious gaming.
Improved gaming audio
Gaming on iOS also gets a boost in terms of audio, with personalized spatial audio coming to the AirPods 3, AirPods Pro and AirPods Max, bringing dynamic head tracking for games, meaning positional sound is preserved despite possible head bobbing .
And when the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max are used in conjunction with Game Mode, users get the lowest-latency wireless audio Apple has ever delivered, and voice communications in 16-bit, 48 kHz audio.
One thing to keep in mind is that to get the most out of these gaming audio upgrades, developers will need to build advanced sound design into their games using an Apple API.