Diablo Immortal shows gaming phones should be taken seriously

digitaltrends.com:

Diablo Immortal is one of the biggest mobile game releases of the year, and it’s sure to be as challenging for mobile devices to run as it is for a player to complete. Gaming smartphones are sold with the promise of having all the right technology and software tools to make games fly and, in theory, you a better player.

Is a gaming phone necessary to get the best from Diablo Immortal, or is an iPhone just as capable? To find out, we’ve played the game on the Asus ROG Phone 5 and the iPhone 13 Pro.

The Asus ROG Phone 5 came out in early 2021, but remains the pinnacle of gaming smartphones due to Asus’s comprehensive software toolkit, a giant amount of processing ability, shoulder mounted buttons, many accessories, and a whole lot more. We tried the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor and 18GB of RAM for power, and the 6.78-inch, 144Hz refresh rate AMOLED screen for the visuals. The 360Hz touch sampling rate should make it lightning fast to react too.

The iPhone 13 Pro came out toward the end of 2021. It has Apple’s powerful A15 Bionic processor for power, and a 6.1-inch OLED screen with Apple’s ProMotion 120Hz refresh rate technology. Apple doesn’t publicly talk about RAM or touch sampling rates. It also doesn’t have a specific gaming mode like the ROG Phone 5, so you have to trust Apple to deliver the performance goods when needed. Qualcomm’s Adreno 660 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) runs the Asus phone, while it’s Apple’s own 5-core GPU inside the iPhone.

Both are technically very different, and they’re different in design and in-hand feel too. The ROG Phone 5 is a heavyweight at 238 grams compared to the 204 grams of the iPhone, plus the phone is considerably longer in landscape orientation.