The Wild Rift beta is live in the US – here’s how it plays on the newest and oldest iPhones compatible with the leading game.
Now that Wild Rift, the mobile version of Riot Games’ popular MOBA game League of Legends, has finally launched its open beta in the US, we’ve played enough matches on the fastest phones you can buy. But how does that compare to playing on the oldest phones? We don’t have too many older Android handsets lying around, but we do have a 2015-era iPhone 6S, so we loaded up Wild Rift to see how the mobile battle arena (MOBA) plays on the low end of the iPhone compatibility spectrum. Its competitor? The latest iPhone 12 Pro, which tops our Geekbench 5 scores over phones like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and the Asus ROG 5 Ultimate. While we’d love to get to a similar Android comparison soon, this is helpful for anyone still holding on to aging but still very functional Apple hardware. And the short answer is: your iPhone 6S plays Wild Rift just fine. Thankfully, Wild Rift has been well optimized to run on older phones without a noticeable difference in gameplay quality – fulfilling what Trent Campbell, Principal Technical Product Manager on Wild Rift, told TechRadar: “We want to ensure players have a good experience playing Wild Rift on all supported devices, and we think it’s super important for Wild Rift to support a very wide range of them. For players using high-end devices like the iPhone 12, we want to wow them with incredible visuals and animations, but also ensure that the game is as accessible as it can be for those that don’t have access to high-end phones,” Campbell said. But there are differences – here’s what you’re missing out on if you haven’t upgraded to a newer iPhone yet. The good news is that performance didn’t differ much between the iPhone 12 Pro (running Apple’s A14 Bionic chipset with 6GB RAM) and the iPhone 6S (A9 Bionic with 2GB RAM). There were zero (and I mean zero) hiccups or slowdown periods of the older phone catching up to on-screen activity. The only slowdown happened when we experienced low signal, and it happened on both phones. We tested both phones on signal/tethering and WiFi, with good (85Mbps down) and terrible ( Wild Rift’s developers knew that adapting the game to mobile meant dealing with fluctuating signal, which will likely be a continual battle, so they’re constantly monitoring and “looking for ways to deliver a reliable and stable service while holding ISPs and mobile providers accountable as well,” Dawer Jung, Live Operations at Wild Rift, told TechRadar over email. “It’s hard to put a single number against connection speeds as everyone’s situation differs (you could live alone on Wi-Fi, or with 5 other people), but we’ve optimized Wild Rift to a point at which very low bandwidth connections can still play the game reliably,” Jung said.
