Fortnite Mobile Vs. Xbox One X Comparison Reveals Some Surprising Results

Fortnite: Battle Royale is live on iOS devices now for select players and their friends, and a recent comparison between how the game plays and looks on the iPhone X and the Xbox One X show how similar the experiences are. Digital Foundry has done a side-by-side comparison of the game and found high-level graphics and performance have made their way to the mobile version.

Writer John Linneman fired up Fortnite on an iPhone X and joined forces with himself on his Xbox One X. He captured real-time footage of the exact same gameplay on both systems in spectator mode, and remarked just how similar the two experiences looked and played. On account of Fortnite's cross-platform play between PC and Xbox One, it's no surprise the mobile version matches it closely, but it's still a major accomplishment for a multiplayer shooter this size. You can see some of the side-by-side gameplay below.

The two experiences are not carbon copies of each other, however, and there are some compromises when playing on the iPhone X. For example, the game is noticeably darker on mobile, while shadow map draw distance is reduced. There's no grass animation on mobile, with wind effects reduced. Of course, these differences are heightened when you're playing on an older or less powerful iPhone.

In terms of performance, Digital Foundry found there was only a minor stutter on the iPhone X with Fortnite running at a locked at 30 frames per second. There are frame-pacing hiccups occasionally, but overall it's an impressively stable experience very similar to the console experience, wrote Digital Foundry.

There are a few gameplay differences between Fortnite on mobile vs. console, of course, but it's clear that bringing the game to iOS is off to an early success for developer Epic Games. An Android version will be released in the coming months, and you can read more about Fornite's latest 3.3 update, which adds new content to both Battle Royale and Save the World modes. Its latest limited-time mode, Blitz, just launched this week and has already received a hotfix update.