Early review suggests Apple Arcade struggling with 4K

1080p works just fine..

What you need to know

• Early review of Apple Arcade for Apple TV suggests optimization problems.
• According to one reviewer, a handful of games performed very poorly at 4K resolution.
• There were no issues reported at 1080p.

An early review of Apple Arcade is suggesting that the Apple TV 4K is struggling to handle some of the titles in the library, but only at 4K resolutions. The review, posted by Macworld suggested that whilst Apple Arcade's game are "amazing", some of them seem to be suffering from severe optimization problems at 4K resolution.

As per the story:

Yes, Apple Arcade games are amazing on the Apple TV 4K—provided, that is, you can get them to run properly. Frogger in Toy Town has frame rates so low in the opening cutscene that it sometimes resembles stop-animation. I couldn't even get The Pinball Wizard to run past the initial story cutscene, and so I had to content myself with watching the loading animation spin for several minutes before I finally gave up. Note, though, that these are extreme examples: With most games, I'd see only occasional frame rate drops, even in graphically complex titles like Oceanhorn 2. Even so, these problems didn't exist on the iPad and iPhone.

The report goes on to suggest that the issue is almost certainly optimization based, rather than a hardware issue.

Apple's hardware should be more than capable of handling existing Apple Arcade games, as the Apple TV 4K comes with an A10X Fusion chip with 64-bit architecture running at 2.3GHz, along with 3GB of RAM. Compare that to the Nintendo Switch, which has an Nvidia Tegra X1 for the GPU and a combination CPU featuring the quad-core Cortex A57 and quad-core-A53 running at 1GHz, along 4GB of RAM.

This is sort of an "apples to oranges" comparison, but rough Geekbench 5 benchmarks for iPhones and iPads using an A10X Fusion suggest the Apple TV 4K should soundly trounce the Switch in most cases, yet the Switch rarely has a problem handling games as intense as id Software's 2016 Doom remake. Apple Arcade currently doesn't have any game approaching that kind of complexity, and I don't think the Switch's extra gig of RAM is going to make that much of a difference.

The reports aren't confined to this review, and there are some reports across Twitter that performance seems to be a problem on the Apple TV 4K.

A big problem I found, messing around with Apple Arcade games on the Apple TV last night, is that performance is a big issue for a lot of the games that rely on 3D graphics. ChuChu Rocket and Frogger both run at like 10–15 FPS on my Apple TV 4K. https://t.co/G1lj2KTg39

— nick (@The24thFrame) September 26, 2019

The review is quick to point out that the problems only seemed to occur when playing games at 4K resolution.

When I went into the Settings app and brought the video format down to 1080p SDR, I had no trouble running any Apple Arcade games at all. All of this leads me to believe poor optimization is the true culprit here, either within tvOS itself or in the hands of developers who may have spent more time optimizing their games for the iPhone and iPad.