Grid Legends is a great-looking racing game. While it doesn’t have the wide open scope of Forza Horizon, or the detailed on-track ray tracing of Gran Turismo, it does have excellent lighting and beautiful stages. That’s true across all the platforms, but the recent release on Android and iOS is intriguing. We’ve experienced mixed fortunes for triple-A titles released on mobile, but having played the game extensively on iPhone 15 Pro, I’m impressed. In fact, it’s one of the only triple-A iOS ports I can actually recommend.
Initial impressions suggest a favourable visual turnout on iPhone with results that seem broadly comparable to the last-gen Xbox One version of the game, but of course, there are some compromises. Lighting has been significantly simplified while shadows are obviously lower-res, with a sharper divide between cascades. Shadow aliasing is a bigger problem as a result, with coarser shadows that look less natural at rest. This becomes a more substantial issue in cockpit view, where the close camera perspective exposes the low resolution of the nearest cascade.
On top of that, foliage shadows also don’t animate on iPhone, presumably to reduce the number of shadow map updates the game has to process. I would say these shadow changes aren’t that noticeable in the typical third-person camera when actually driving at speed though. There are other small lighting changes throughout the game, like the less effective impression of ambient occlusion in this truck cockpit. The foliage in some tracks appears a bit flatter, with lower contrast shade beneath. Subtle lighting tweaks are present across the tracks if you look closely, though during gameplay their impact is more muted.
Volumetric lighting is probably the biggest flat-out omission here, as the trackside environment often no longer features volumetric lights. This makes a big visual difference in certain tracks, like this, though most tracks and times of day look similar enough. That said, there is one lighting tweak that actually favours the iPhone. The real-time cubemaps used for vehicle reflections on Xbox update at just 15Hz, once for every 2 frames essentially. On iPhone, they are full-rate, and distract much less and of a higher resolution.