Why no MetalFX upscaler
Death Stranding was recently released on iPhone and Mac. Digital Foundry specialists decided to check how the project works on new platforms.
It turned out that the game runs well on the iPhone 15 Pro, although not without problems. On average, players can count on 30 fps, but drops of up to 15 fps and even lower occur, and sometimes in certain scenes we are not even talking about individual drops, but about a significant decrease in the average frames per second.
The game runs in dynamic resolution and for some reason without the MetalFX upscaler. However, the average resolution is about 400p, which is quite low. However, given the size of smartphone screens, everything is not so bad for the player. Interestingly, the graphics settings are similar to those on the PlayStation 4.
It’s extremely inconvenient to play without an external controller due to the abundance of buttons, but this applies to most similar games on smartphones.
As for Mac, everything is much better there, as expected. On a MacBook Pro with SoC M1 Max, the game runs at an average of 60 fps, but with MetalFX. In terms of performance, such a laptop in this particular game is approximately comparable to a PC based on the GeForce RTX 2060.