Vainglory & Metal: How the iPhone 6 Plus Even Beats Consoles

With Apple unveiling the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus this morning, naturally there are a lot of potential buyers discussing how the updated phones will make their lives more manageable. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus’ A8 processor are what’ll get all the attention, but as Super Evil Mega Corp representatives showed on stage with its Vainglory iPhone game, it’ll be the Metal software that’ll provide the best gaming experience there has ever been on an iPhone. Performance even better than what’s available on some consoles.

Representatives of Super Evil Mega Corp showed off Vainglory on stage during Apple’s iPhone 6 keynote  this morning. Watchers got a brief look at some gameplay but Super Evil Mega Corp was mostly there to talk about how Metal enabled them to make Vainglory look beautiful despite only being on a smartphone.

At its core, Metal is really an API for the operating system that the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and some older iPhones will run soon, thanks to iOS 8. iOS 8 allows developers to access each iPhone’s processor to harness more raw power. Think of it as a short cut, a way for developers to bypass extra steps and fine tune their games to look better than they ever could have been on iOS 7, the operating system that Apple revealed and released last year.

In a statement about its appearance on stage during the iPhone 6 event, Super Evil Mega Corp talked more about how good Vainglory will look on the iPhone 6 Plus and how Metal was key to this saying, “thanks to Metal and our E.V.I.L. game engine, Vainglory can now deliver a level of graphics performance and resolution beyond that of a Blu-Ray player on a new HD TV.” The post went on to indicate that Vainglory will have a higher visual quality than was “most current consoles can deliver.”

Besides talking in detail about the Metal, Super Evil Mega Corp also released a trailer for the upcoming game. In addition to providing a very nice look at the detail users can expect from Vainglory, the trailer also reveals that the game will have a LAN Party mode so that iPhone and iPad owners can play Vainglory wirelessly against their friends. LAN Parties were and remain popular because they allow users to play against each other without having to go through an online gaming service.

Vainglory and its development team are likely to get all the attention here, but if potential iPhone 6 Plus buyers take anything away from the Vainglory presentation on stage it’s that Apple still has every intention of dominating mobile gaming in the near future. Super Evil Mega Corp’s remarks about the game not being possible on some modern consoles is a bit hyperbolic, but it underscores just how quickly Apple has learned what it needs to provide developers with for games that are quickly becoming competitive with console titles.

To be clear, the Metal API isn’t doing this on its own, Apple’s A8 processor for the iPhone 6 makes this possible by letting games use it at full power for longer periods of time. It does all of this while still not heating up in users’ hands.

Read: Apple Unveils Two iPhone 6 Models with larger Screens

Apple’s iOS 8 operating system launches in just a few weeks. Vainglory will follow it in October. We don’t yet know how much the game will cost. We do know that iOS 8 will come installed on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.