Epic Games has announced Fortnite Battle Royale will be coming to Android and iOS. This will include cross platform play between Android, iOS, PC, Mac and PS4.

Hey Fortnite Community,

Fortnite Battle Royale is coming to mobile devices! On phones and tablets, Fortnite is the same 100-player game you know from PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Mac. Same gameplay, same map, same content, same weekly updates. Starting Monday, you can sign-up for the Invite Event on iOS. Support for Android will be coming in the next few months.

In partnership with our friends at Sony, Fortnite Battle Royale will support Cross Play and Cross Progression between PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, iOS and eventually Android. This means players across devices can squad up with friends and play together.

We believe this is the future of games. The same game on all platforms. Console quality graphics and action. Play when you want, where you want.

Source: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/mobile-announce

UPDATE:

Cross platform play has also been announced with the Xbox One, PC, Mac, iOS and Android.

Source: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/xbox-cross-platform-fortnite

UPDATE 2:

Gameplay trailer captured on an iPhone X (Apple A11)

Apple decided to use their own API, Metal. As well, their OpenGL support has been behind for years.

Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1 today:

Vulkan 1.1 will drive increased industry momentum for this new-generation, cross-platform standard for explicit control over GPU acceleration. Vulkan now ships natively on almost all GPU-enabled platforms, including Windows 7, 8.X, 10, Android 7.0+ and Linux, plus Khronos recently announced open source tools to enable Vulkan 1.0 applications to be ported to macOS and iOS. Vulkan has widespread support in leading games engines including Unreal, Unity, Source 2 from Valve, id Tech, CroTeam’s Serious Engine, CryEngine, and Xenko. Vulkan is being used in over 30 cutting-edge games on diverse desktop and mobile platforms, including Doom, Quake, Roblox, The Talos Principle, Dota 2, and is the exclusive API used in AAA titles such as Wolfenstein II and Doom VFR.

New functionality in Vulkan 1.1 includes Subgroup Operations that enable highly-efficient sharing and manipulation of data between multiple tasks running in parallel on a GPU. Vulkan 1.1 also enables applications to perform rendering and display operations using resources that they cannot access or copy - for secure playback and display of protected multimedia content.

In addition, a wide range of Vulkan 1.0 extensions have been integrated, bringing significant proven functionality into core Vulkan 1.1, including: simultaneous rendering of multiple image views, use of multiple GPUs in a single system, and cross-process API interoperability for advanced rendering and compositing operations often used in demanding applications such as Virtual Reality. These core functionalities also include advanced compute with 16-bit memory access, and support for HLSL memory layouts, and display, processing and compositing of video streams, through direct sampling of YCbCr color formatted textures produced by many video codecs.

Integral to the release of Vulkan 1.1 is the new SPIR-V 1.3 specification that expands the capabilities of the Vulkan shader intermediate representation to support subgroup operations and enable enhanced compiler optimizations. The SPIR-V tools ecosystem continues to gain significant momentum with front-end compilers for both GLSL and HLSL, and to expand low-level tooling support from the open source SPIRV-Tools project.

Credit Khronos Group

Full press release: https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-group-releases-vulkan-1-1

With price tag like that (and a willingness to actually buy one), they probably already own a PC. It's clearly a niche product and by no means is going to take on something like the Switch.

As I said before, it could even be a one-off and still be a useful device for some, because at the end of the day it doesn't need to succeed in volume for its ecosystem to survive. It's simply a PC.

It would appear they're using a dual channel configuration. If you're talking about a single channel implementation, that might explain the discrepancy.

For example, a version of the Lenovo Ideapad 720S uses Ryzen 2500U (Vega 8) with single channel 8 GB DDR4 2133 ram and it saw a considerable hit in performance because of it.

@Pedro

A smartphone with a Snapdragon 845 and a clamp-style controller could probably handle a lot of that very well.

I think the ability to play native PC titles is the definite highlight. Of course, it is a PC after all, so it really depends on what the user wants.

UPDATE 2 - Preorder open March 15 & official press release

https://www.smachz.com/media/filer_public/6b/36/6b361516-a8bf-40a3-8cc9-0d177146e4bf/sz_-_press_release_v1000_announcement.pdf

https://www.smachz.com/

Benchmarks from the press release for a number of titles:

• The Witcher 3 (720p Medium settings) ~ 40 FPS
• Alien: Isolation (1080p Low settings) ~ 50 FPS
• GTA 5 (720p Normal settings) ~ 60 FPS
• League of Legends (1080p High settings) ~ 60 FPS
• Rocket League (1080p Normal settings) ~ 60 FPS
• Dark Souls 3 (720p Low settings) ~ 40 FPS

This is starting to become more elaborate than a "fake" moon landing, I don't know if I'm ready to put on my aluminum foil hat just yet.

The most cost effective approach would probably to buy the base model and upgrade it with your own RAM and SSD.

This would probably the best option.

Another potential drawback for the entry model (prior to upgrades) would be the use of single channel DDR4, this could become a rather significant bottleneck.

UPDATE - Pricing announced:

It was just being shown off at Embedded World 2018:

It's clearly a work in progress, but they did have populated boards on display:

I've heard it pronounced a few different ways, but I believe it's pronounced the same way as the word Mach (as in, Mach number).

It uses Vega 8, so it should be able to play it at low/medium settings.