Developer shows off Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA V, Fallout 4, and other AAA PC games running natively on iPhone 18 Pro
Modern Apple iPhones have incredibly powerful SoCs but very few apps and games tap their full potential. One area that can let chips like the A19 Pro and A20 Pro unleash their full potential is game emulation.
Quite a few game emulators like the Delta for Nintendo systems, PPSSPP for the PlayStation Portable, and Dolphin for the GameCube and Wii among others are either available via the App Store or can be sideloaded.
However, there have been no emulators for Windows PC games on iOS unlike Android. That changes with Madeira.
Madeira allows running Windows PC games on a non-jailbroken iPhone. According to the developer Will Faust, Madeira is essentially a port of Wine (ARM64EC) for iOS with FEX-Emu for x86-64 to ARM64 translation and DXMT for D3D11 to Metal translation combined into a single pipeline.
Madeira requires a minimum of iPhone 13 Pro or above powered by the A15 Bionic or above.
In the project's GitHub repo, Faust claims that Madeira can run games like Thumper and Ultrakill while Marvel Cosmic Invasion "has reached gameplay" albeit being unreliable.
Now, Madeira also seems to be able to run the highly demanding Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR 2) fully on device on an iPhone 18 Pro. While the initial attempt has been just a slideshow with single digit frame rates and loads of graphical glitches, the developer showed progress in attaining close to 30 fps in more recent builds at nearly 720p. There's still a long way to go, however, especially with regards to arrangement of onscreen controls.
Additionally, Madeira now supports a swap-like implementation that can offload memory into the iPhone's storage. This apparently kept the RDR 2's memory footprint around the 7.6 GB mark with possibility of lowering it even further to allow running on 8 GB iPhones.
GTA 5 support is in the works too alongside a host of other AAA titles
Faust also has a working copy of Grand Theft Auto V running on the iPhone. Performance seems to be decent for an initial implementation and will only get better with further optimizations.
The devs note in the project's Discord channel that using Steam hogs a lot of resources. The workaround for this was Madeira Dock, a headless Steam client that only uses the necessary verified Steam DLLs without the headroom needed by the full Steam client. This is not a bypass for Steam's DRM, however.
The other alternative, they note, is to use DRM-free games from GOG.
The project has also demonstrated Fallout 4 running on iOS along with several other 32-bit games like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Far Cry 3, and more.
Emulation requires sideloading with JIT
Just-in-time (JIT) compilation is required for fast, real-time performance when emulating apps on a non-native host CPU. A major quirk with the Apple App Store (from iOS 18.4+) is that it does not allow apps and emulators to use JIT owing to security concerns, with the only exceptions being approved alternate web browser engines via BrowserEnginekit.
Therefore, the only way to get emulators like Madeira running is to sideload the IPA manually and enable JIT for optimal performance. Which means that apps like Madeira will never be distributed via the App Store.
Sideloading on iOS can be a bit tricky if you are new to the process, but it is not too difficult once you get the hang of it.
You can purchase an Apple Developer certificate for $99 and get a year's time to use the sideloaded app before renewal. Regular Apple account users can also sideload provided you renew the sideloaded app every seven days.
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