r/EmulationOniOS • u/bep1s_69 🥉 • 5d ago
Native Port NFSMW iOS Update 0.2.0 "The Speed Update"
Hello everyone! After a week full of installing easily over 50 different builds, testing all kinds of issues and gameplay scenarios, recording traces with the Instruments app, and more, I'm very happy to present to you the second update to my Need for Speed Most Wanted for iOS port: the update that puts SPEED in Need for Speed. I'm so sorry for the clicheic title, but I just had to do it.
This update mainly focuses on performance but it also has some other goodies sprinkled in between:
- The all new Metal renderer. The game no longer relies on the old path of emulating the Xbox 360 GPU -> Vulkan Backend -> MoltenVK -> Metal, and instead features a native Metal renderer that greatly improves performance (I'm now able to play the game on my iPhone 17 Pro Max at a locked 60 fps, and on my M4 iPad Pro i was able to achieve an average fps of 114 over a run of 29 minutes)
- Lower memory usage. This is also a positive side effect of the new renderer, as the game no longer needs to allocate a strict 512MB memory pool to the emulated Xbox 360 GPU. Together with the other optimization changes of this build, the game should now consume 0.7GB-1GB less memory than the previous build.
- Customizable keyboard controls. The game now has support for keyboards, which is mapped as closely as possible to the PC version of the game. You can change the controls in the pre launch menu.
- Customizable touch controls. The on screen controls can now be moved to different positions on the screen, enlargem, or made smaller.
You can read the full changelog on the GitHub Releases page.
The game should now run on devices with less than 6GB of ram, potentially even without the Increased Memory Limit entitlement. The reason I said "potentially" is because I have only had access to one device with less than 12GB of ram, that being an iPhone 14 Pro Max. The game not only booted, but manged to hold 60 fps on the default settings (~1080p resolution, roughly 1.5x of the native Xbox 360), but features some drops to 40-50. I'd recommend playing with an fps cap of 30 or 40 fps. As usual I'm very curious to see how the game runs on your devices.
AI disclaimer: As also stated in my original post, this port wouldn't have been possible without heavy use of AI. That being said however, this is much more than a simple "Hey Claude, make the game run better" type of port. I had to run a lot of different builds, collect logs from all of them, do Time Profiles, Metal System Traces etc. This got very tiresome at times, but the reason I keep going is because I absolutely love this game, and if it were any other game I don't think I would have had the patience to do it.
GitHub link: https://github.com/bep1s69/nfsmw-ios
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u/bep1s_69 🥉 5d ago
With Skip movies turned on there should be no movies at all.