iPad gaming

As your resident iPad advocate, I will continue to say that the iPad is the most versatile computer on the market. It can be a laptop, tablet, e-book, a notetaking machine, or even a portable display. In this post, we will be focusing on that final piece. iPads have always had fantastic displays for all things media consumption, especially now with the M4 iPad Pro. But what if I told you that you could use that same iPad as a dummy display to play your Xbox, PlayStation, or even your Mac mini? Here is how you do it.

I always tell people that iPads, specifically iPad Pros, have the best displays for any tech device. Even dating back to the 2018 iPad Pro, that 120hz ProMotion display was second to none. As we have gotten new iPads, Apple has doubled down on the display by giving us MiniLED with the M1 iPad Pro, and now we have new OLED panels with the new M4 iPads. But aside from using features like Sidecar, you cannot natively use your iPad as a dummy display for other video sources. I am going to show you how.

The team at Frostbite, the gaming engine behind many popular console titles and more recent mobile games, today published a blog post showing off a tech demo of the graphically demanding Battlefield 4 console game running on an iPad. The company previously showed off what the Frostbite engine was capable of with the Battlefield 4 Commander app and the Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare tech demo it showed off at WWDC, but the Battlefield 4 tech demo was made possible thanks to some big graphics improvements courtesy of Apple’s new Metal graphics API.

The team says “Metal has created possibilities previously out of reach and for the first time we can include both high visual fidelity and a large number of objects.”
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