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25 stunners to fill your collection
Updated September 14, 2020: New entries added
We've all encountered those earnest video game bores who insist that graphics don't matter. It's the gameplay that counts.
Utter poppycock, of course. The last time we checked, video gaming was a predominantly visual medium.
Besides, how a game looks can have a profound impact on how it plays. How many of your favourite games are downright ugly? The best examples ten to marry solid mechanics with a believably realised world. In other words, they tend to look the part.
It's no coincidence, then, that the following list is full of games that are really good fun to play. Visuals, gameplay and audio all tying together beautifully to make brilliant games
Only some of the games on this list take a photorealistic, or technically expansive approach to graphics. Some are more abstract leaning on a great art style to make their point.
And there's quite a variation in the type of game we've included too. All they really share in common is that they make us go 'oooh' when we look at them.
GRID Autosport
GRID Autosport isn't just a console-like racer. It's a fully fledged console racer, complete with cream of the crop visuals. You'll need a beast of an iOS device to run it, but by goodness is it pretty
The Room: Old Sins
All four The Room games are among the handsomest games on mobile. No other series takes such delight in intricate clockwork mechanisms, or renders materials in such a realistically tactile fashion.
Sayonara Wild Hearts
This psychedelic pop video of a rhythm action game was probably the most visually impressive game of the initial Apple Arcade line-up. Which is really saying something.
Asphalt 9: Legends
Asphalt 9 is a stonker of an arcade racer, with all of the visual fidelity and OTT pyrotechnics those two works imply.
Oceanhorn 2
Playing Zelda on an iPhone might not be the ridiculous proposition it once was, but Oceanhorn 2 remains a startlingly impressive 3D action RPG that's straight out of the recent Nintendo playbook.
Unkilled
Madfinger has always made the kind of games you boot up to test your new phone. Unkilled is the latest, and thus the most technically advanced example. It's also an entertainingly hectic zombie-themed FPS.
Frost (Kunabi)
Frost is a beautiful minimalist puzzler that bathes your eyes in glowing, flowing particle effects. The way its illuminated dots dance around the screen and react to your touch is quite enchanting.
Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition
Square Enix has done an amazing thing with Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition. It's taken its latest triple A console RPG, kept all the bombastic cutscenes, and rebuilt the visuals in a chunky chibi-style. The result is a technically brilliant mobile adventure.
Inside
Best Looking Games For 5k Machines
Inside is stunning in every way, and that includes its beautifully shady art style and fluid animation. If there's a more stylish platformer on mobile, we haven't seen it.
Manifold Garden
Manifold Garden is a true assault to the senses - a first person puzzler filled with impossible futuristic architecture that treats gravity as an optional setting.
Oddmar
Oddmar is another beautiful-looking 2D platformer, with a wonderfully dense cartoon-viking world and plenty of breath-taking set-pieces.
Monument Valley 2
A game doesn't have to be a lavish 3D extravaganza to gain our appreciation. Take Monument Valley 2 - an ostensibly simple isometric puzzler with an astonishing mind-bending art style.
If Found...
A narrative adventure with a truly distinctive art style, with every scene appearing to have been sketched in with a pencil, as if you were flicking through the main character's notepad. This visual style ties directly in with how the game plays, as well as simply looking gorgeous.
The Witness
Nothing else quite looked like The Witness when it made its debut on console and PC a few years ago, and nothing quite looks like it on iOS either. Thekla has created a beautifully strange and diverse island to explore, where every view is a potential wallpaper.
Gorogoa
This puzzling masterpiece has a unique aesthetic that's fit to be hung on your wall, with a comic book frame-shifting mechanic that ensures screengrab-worthy moments around every corner.
Assemble With Care
You wouldn't think that a game all about fixing everyday gadgets would be so visually opulent. But then, Assemble with Care was made by the team behind Monument Valley, so it kind of figures.
Sky: Children of the Light
Journey creator Thatgamecompany made its first mobile-focused game in Sky: Children of the Light. The result is a suitably dreamy multiplayer experience.
Meteorfall: Krumit's Tale
Best Looking Games For 5k Mac Display
What's often overlooked with Slothwerks's Meterofall games is how stunning they are to look at, perhaps because their Adventure Time-esque style seems so breezy and casual. But boy does this masterful card battler look the part, with exquisite art direction and animation.
Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders 2
A flight simulator that really brings its A game on the visual front. Swooping through the stormy skies in your fighter plane makes you feel like you're in a big budget war film.
GRIS
There are better, more playable platform-puzzlers than GRIS on iOS. But is there a more beautiful or emotionally affecting example? Probably not. It's a painterly masterpiece.
Gumslinger
Gumslinger looks good enough to eat, each one-on-one duel between its jelly baby-like gunslingers looking as sweet as it plays. It shows the value of picking a strong visual theme for your game, then executing it with the minimum of fuss.
CSR Racing 2
In CSR Racing 2, the style arguably IS the substance. You don't need to worry about steering your car, which means that developer NaturalMotion can zoom in and show you the real-life hardware in glorious, shiny detail.
Banner Saga 2
Banner Saga and its sequel feel quite unlike any other RPG or strategy game out there, and a large part of that is down to the art style. This solemn tale of Norse mythology appears to have been drawn by the most talented animators of the 1970s. It's beautiful.
Grand Mountain Adventure
A downright gorgeous free-roaming snowboarding game that gives you a full pristine mountain to explore. This game earns its place on this list with its realistic depiction of snow alone, but there's much more besides.
Little Misfortune
A deeply characterful side-scrolling adventure game with a distinctive animated style and some surprisingly hefty subject matter. Little Misfortune is a darkly humorous delight.
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Last week, Apple announced a new 27-inch iMac that packs an impressive 5K Retina display. As we’ve already detailed, these new 5K displays are thinner, cheaper, draw less power thanks to a more-efficient LED backlight, and, perhaps most importantly, Apple is selling the whole 27-inch iMac system at a mind-blowing price of $2500. That’s the same price tag on Dell’s 5K monitor.
Updated November 4: Sadly, it’s time for a mea culpa. On October 24 we mistakenly identified the iMac with 5K Retina display as having a 30Hz panel. The 27-inch iMac does indeed output 5K @ 60Hz — and to hit those kinds of frequencies, Apple used its own customized timing controller, rather than DisplayPort 1.2 (which can’t drive 5K @ 60Hz). More on that can be found further down the story.
Original story: A late-2014 display hooked to an early 2012 GPU
The GPU powering the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display is the R9 M290X, with the R9 M295X offered as an optional upgrade. The R9 M295X hasn’t technically been announced, but rumors from months back suggested this would be a Tonga-class GPU. Regardless, the R9 M290X is the minimum spec — and that chip is a rebranded HD 8970M, which was a rebranded HD 7970M, which is functionally equivalent to a desktop Radeon HD 7870.
In other words, the GPUs inside the new iMac are going to be limited to DisplayPort 1.2. That matters, because it takes roughly 17.2Gbps of bandwidth to drive a 4K @ 60 fps signal in a single stream (Single Stream Transport). To summarize the difference between SST and MST, an MST display creates two half-width tiles on the monitor and interleaves two different DisplayPort streams together to create a contiguous image, while an SST display functions like a standard monitor. MST and SST displays typically look identical in common applications, but some games support MST poorly, resulting in menus or functions crammed into half the monitor, or movies playing back in a squashed, half-width format.
Critically, however, MST is the only way to drive a larger-than-4K panel. DisplayPort 1.2 has just enough bandwidth to support a single 4K @ 60 fps SST stream, but 5K is far too large for the standard. When Apple talks about a 40-gigabit TCON, it may have designed a single TCON to output to two DP 1.2 streams — that’s not technically impossible — but it’s not being done with a single stream within the DP 1.2 spec.
Read: No, TV makers, 4K and UHD are not the same thing
Since Tonga doesn’t support HDMI 2.0 or DP 1.3 (which does support 5K SST), DP 1.2 is the only available standard to piggy-back. If Apple had somehow redesigned the TCON to compress a 5K stream into existing DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth, it wouldn’t need a 40Gbps TCON in the first place. Anandtech notes that there’s another possibility — Apple may indeed have designed its own TCON, overclocked it, customized it for low overhead timing, and be pulling just enough bandwidth out of DP 1.2 to get it done.
Updated November 4: An iFixit teardown shows that Apple did indeed use a customized TCON — a modified Parade Technologies part using a non-standard 60-pin Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) connector (it’s usually just 40 pins). We’re not sure if Apple is using a variant of eDP 1.3, or some own Frankensteinian solution that combines two eDP 1.2 feeds — but in either case, there’s clearly enough bandwidth to drive a 5K display at 60Hz.
This kind of issue is common with MST — but did Apple overclock DP to hit higher bandwidths and avoid MST?
Either way, Apple would have to overclock the DisplayPort signal by 50-100% to hit the bandwidth it needs for 5K on single stream transport.
Refresh rates, gaming, and scaling
The many clever layers of the iMac with Retina display
Scaling is another potential issue — but Apple has always done this one better than Microsoft and 5120×2880 has exactly four times the pixels of the old 2560×1440 monitors, which should make scaling up relatively simple.
Finally, gaming — and here’s where the reality is going to bite. You aren’t going to be doing any gaming on a 5K display at anything like high detail levels. You may not even pull it off at low detail levels, and for a very simple reason: The R9 M290 is a midrange GPU from 2012 boxing way, way out of its weight class on this one. Despite the term, 5K is not 25% more pixels than 4K — it’s almost two times as many pixels.
Not even dual GTX 980s in SLI could drive 60-fps high-detail gaming on that kind of rig. And that means there’s no chance any AMD mobile GPU — even if the R9 M295 is a Tonga implementation — is going to be able to do it either.
Now read: The state of 4K gaming: We’re glitching our way to gaming nirvana
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