Key Takeaways
- Snapdragon 8 Elite has been seen emulating resource-intensive PC games at playable frame rates, in a remarkable feat.
- The Realme GT7 Pro is one of the new flagships that could usher in a return of gaming phone popularity.
- The new closed-source GameFusion emulator presents a curious situation in terms of efficiency and real-world implications, as well as its origins.
Running x86 software on ARM platforms can be incredibly resource-intensive, which is why the emulator community puts in such hard work. In a first, the Snapdragon 8 Elite has been spotted emulating AAA games including Jedi: Fallen Order and Assassin’s Creed: Rogue at up to 50 and 60 FPS, respectively.
Several content creators have demonstrated this in recent days, with Realme Vice President Chase Xu the latest industry figure to show off the GT7 Pro’s remarkable gaming performance (Realme via @MishaalRahman). It looks like premium, pocket-size gaming handhelds are back on the menu.
A truly powerful system-on-a-chip
But what exactly is going on here?
VP Xu’s video offers hard evidence that handheld gaming is in for a moment very soon. It’s a curious situation in some ways, as the demonstration uses an unreleased emulator that almost certainly isn’t related to any of the currently popular, open-source x86/ARM translators.
Source: GameSir via CoreLand / YouTube
A screenshot of the upcoming emulator, still in beta testing.
The emulation software could achieve these results using different techniques. Since it’s apparently closed-source and still in the testing phase, there’s no way to know its methods for sure. We do know it’s called GameFusion, and a video from Chinese site BiliBili indicates it’s likely produced by GameSir. Additional leaks offer more promising numbers, as well as some speculation on the app’s nature and origin.
How viable can AAA emulation be?
It all depends on efficiency
It’s a curious situation developing at the moment, but for now, we’ll stick to real-world implications. We can think of two. Whatever implementation the SD 8 Elite and new emulator use, it had better reach groundbreaking levels of efficiency to play these high-polygon titles for any respectable length of time. Translating all that data and pumping out those frames will absolutely eat through batteries.
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It’s not just battery life, either. Today’s compact smartphones can’t run full-tilt forever without thermal throttling kicking in and slowing things down. Maybe the new software takes advantage of techniques like upscaling or frame generation. Perhaps we’ll see the Snapdragon 8 Elite benefit from its baked-in upstream Linux support, a first for Android-centric SoCs. Either way, we have a feeling we’ll see this new emulator quite a bit once it reaches public release.