I am currently a primary iPhone user, however I am planning a return to android in the next year. I always use custom Roms and lately it feels like I will be moving to GrapheneOS which will require me to move to a pixel phone. I have used a pixel in the past with GrapheneOS on a pixel 4a, but I have yet to use a non snapdragon variant.
I know historically, at least it seems, that Adreno tends to get the most development of emulation geared towards it, specifically on the high end. But, does anyone here have experience using Mali on higher end emulators. I see yuzu has added support recently, but I usually stick too my steam deck for Yuzu. Generally I would be curious about AetherSX2 performance, but any level of insight is greatly appreciated!
Either way I will being going with it, so I suppose I can follow up here with my testing and compare it, relatively poorly, to the SD 8gen1 in my tab s8 ultra.
Currently sporting a Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS but i only started to play with emulation this week on it. So i cant give you much of in-depth answer but just some observations. My previous phone had a snapdragon 870 which serves as kind of a reference point. IDK how i really feel about the Tensor G2 performance. It seems to be on par with the 870. Which is totally fine since the 870 was a pretty fast chip. But damn, with that Google is 3 generations behind Qualcomm atleast when it comes to emulation.
This guy on youtube has quite a few videos testing out the emulation performance on the pixel 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6ayegaEzA&list=PLqTxux-zjFRO47ffNrC0ixA6WCSdd9viq I think he even plays the games long enough for throttling kicking in and then mentions it in the comments. I wouldnt click on his links in the descriptions though.
Besides that i couldnt get to run Burnout 3 and Legends on Aethersx2(in menu but crashes before any race starts). Never had a problem with them on my old phone. But i havent looked further into it. Midnight Club 3 runs great though. 3x resolution runs smooth on the first race.
No experience with yuzu yet. Especially with Mali its just better to wait and let things mature a bit. But i dont expect Tensor G2 to be ever good with switch emulation.
On the emulation for android subreddit Mali is a meme. Snapdragon is clearly faster. No doubt. But Malis reputation is almost comical there. Sure your average 5 year old 150$ Xiaomi has a really slow Mali gpu. But a modern flagship with like a Tensor or a Dimensity chip will be adequate for most stuff. No custom drivers for sure and worse drivers overalls. But its not automatically unuseable.
I appreciate the input! That was what I was thinking but hadn’t really followed mali for emulation in a while.
Thanks for taking the time to write all of that out!
I have recently installed AetherSX2 on my stock Pixel 6 and tried 4 games:
- Tony Hawk Undergroud 2 - works perfectly fine
- Tony Hawk Underground - same as above
- LOTR: Return of the King - small FPS dips (marginal) but some menu text missing
- Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - no happening, terrible FPS
But I haven’t played around with any settings yet, I’m using the default Safe settings. If you want, I could run some tests. But I’m absolutely clueless with this stuff, never done it before.
That is actually super helpful! I appreciate the feedback and I think that gives me something to go off of!
I’ve seen videos of games working 10/10 on Pixel 7 - I don’t know if it’s hardware difference or the settings
