Warframe mobile impresses with buttery-smooth performance on iPhone despite typical onscreen chaos

We reported just last week that the iOS launch for Warframe was on-track, and it appears that all the work Digital Extremes put into squashing bugs and optimising game assets paid off. According to players online, the overall experience of playing Warframe on iOS, which includes cross-platform save, is surprisingly smooth.

In a post on Reddit, u/Now3852JC shows off some screen capture of the game running as smooth as butter on an iPhone 15 Pro (curr. $1,179.95 on Amazon). While it is perhaps to be expected for Apple's most powerful hardware to run a game supposedly compatible with devices as old as the iPhone X, the performance is impressive, given the level of graphical fidelity on display.

Although Warframe is a game that is known in its community to be well-optimised to run on less-powerful hardware, when the in-game graphics settings are cranked and players are in a busy scene, things can get chaotic — and graphically demanding — very quickly. One such situation plays out in the aforementioned Reddit post, and no frame dips are obviously visible. In the subsequent comments on that post, one user mentions that they are getting similarly smooth frame rates on an iPhone 11.

More impressively, though, one player on an iPhone 15 Pro Max (curr. $1,429.96 on Amazon) set the game's field of view and graphics settings to maximum and posted equally smooth gameplay footage to r/Warframe on Reddit. While they did mention that their device got warm during gameplay and experienced significant battery drain from the GPU load, the gameplay remained smooth, with an impressive amount going on on-screen.

That said, playing Warframe on iOS still isn't a perfect experience, with users like u/TTungsteNN posting a bug that saw the game break after applying mods to their warframe. Another user, u/Longjumping-Ad-7104, demonstrated how a particular warframe, Oberon, causes mobile players some headaches due to how an ability called Reckoning is being displayed on iOS. Instead of the translucent smokey effect seen on PC and console, Oberon's Reckoning causes a thick cloud to obstruct much of the player's view.

Overall, though, given the complexity of porting such a feature-rich game from console and PC to mobile, the Warframe launch on iOS has gone fairly smoothly, with no horrific bugs making the game unplayable, for the most part. Digital Extremes is still working on porting the game to Android, but given just how varied Android hardware can be and how demanding Warframe can get, it would be surprising to see that launch go as smoothly.