Battlefield 4 - running on iOS

It has been revealed today that the Swedish Battlefield developer DICE has managed to get parts of Battlefield 4 running on IOS, using the Frostbite engine. Frostbite is the company behind the engine used in games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Need For Speed Rivals, and its engine has already been used in mobile games such as Battlefield 4 Commander App and through a Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare tech demo earlier this year on iPad Air. The next step, according to Kristoffer Benjaminsson- Frostbites head of mobile, was to see if DICE could get Battlefield 4 running on IOS.

In a blog post, Kristoffer Benjaminsson detailed the porting process, saying, "Whatever you can do on console should be doable on mobile as well!"

"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."

Benjaminsson points out that this is a tech demo to test engine capabilities, hence avoid expecting commercial release of Battlefield 4 for your iPad anytime soon.

Before the introduction of Apple's new graphics technology Metal, the team needed to make compromises to get games running on iOS: "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."

Benjaminsson says he will "dig into more details" in the future. You can follow DICES Frostbite development blog for all the latest news about the engine. The following screenshots were revealed in the blog.