Porting Switch games to iPhone 17 Pro Max: memory bandwidth, not compute, is the real bottleneck
happyjoejiang · x · 2026-10-15
Developer happyjoejiang shares hands-on experience porting Switch games to iPhone 17 Pro Max, explaining why raw specs don't tell the story:
- 5x+ the pixels: Switch runs 30fps at 1600×900; the iPhone's 2868×1320 display is 2.6x the pixels, and demanding 60fps doubles it again — over 5x the pixels per second.
- Bandwidth, not compute, is the bottleneck: iPhone CPU/GPU compute is several times Switch's, but memory bandwidth is only 3x, which can't keep up with the pixel load.
- Thermal/power constraints: with no fan, sustained play requires keeping the whole device around 5W; throttling kicks in when hot, with CPU dropping to 1 GHz in heavy scenes — so the dev target has always been stable 60fps at hot-device clocks.
Replies add TOTK's deferred-rendering G-buffer details (most bandwidth goes to unseen albedo/normal buffers) and an optimization tip: render internally at native 1600×900 and scale to the screen for final presentation.
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