Having spent the bulk of my handheld gaming time with the Steam Deck, it was a bit of a shock last year to discover that PC gaming isn’t just possible on Android phones and retro handhelds, it’s powering on in leaps and bounds.
I’ve seen so many different games running beautifully, from older AAA titles like Tomb Raider and Prey (2017), all the way to more demanding ones like RDR2 and even Cyberpunk 2077 (no surprise that the last one is still an imperfect experience, as things stand…but it is possible!).
GameNative lets you play all manner of PC games on Android from GOG, Epic, and Steam.
I reached out to my friend Utkarsh, who is the lead developer of GameNative to ask if he wanted to share his story and let me interview him.
His background in development and gaming through to how GameNative started and is built, all the way to what the future might bring for his program. This is an interview on what I think might be at least part of the future of handheld gaming, and I hope you find this interesting:
https://gardinerbryant.com/i-genuinely-feel-gamenative-could-replace-handheld-pcs/
So it’s Stadia, again?
Nothing about this is in any way similar to Stadia.
Is there like a general guideline as to what games would be compatible with which device? For example, I have a pixel 8 pro, but I can’t seem to get anything to boot up. How can I tell, by the release year, that a game should be light enough for me to run on my device?
I’d recommend seeing what the community has shared, others may have uploaded their games/settings for that phone on EmuReady. The sites is maintained purely to share exactly that.
https://www.emuready.com/listings?deviceIds=["b600b2d5-3631-4f50-b235-a9d0d2559445"]
(here is the results filtered just by your handset, but these include all kinds of emulation, not just GameNative)
But by the same token, 99% of games which do (and don’t) run won’t have been shared there either. So it is a game-by-game basis.
A good one to start with would be a ‘light’ title like DREDGE, if you own it?
I’ll do a little checking and see what I can find on your phone though, will come back and edit with what I find soon!
Edit: Here is a post on Reddit where the OP asks the community how the Pixel 8 is for emulation in general. The top comment says that they’re using Winlator and have 60FPS/720p performance for BioShock, New Vegas, Wow with dx9/10 games. So these should translate to being the same performance/playability on GameNative (I’d hazard, anyway)
There’s also results in the GameNative Discord, but too many to share here. I do hope this helps, though!
Fuck android, last thing I want is more locked down devices bloated and filled with spyware.
What’s the alternative? Keep in mind: we’re talking about a primary phone used for calls, texts, navigation, banking, payments, photography, and social media.
GameNative is open-source, free, and 100% spyware free.
What on earth?! I’m confused, are you saying GameNative is locked down, bloated and filled with spyware? Or that users who are running Android shouldn’t have something that is open-source and spyware free? Just checking for some clarification here, since your rant seems a bit…off-topic.
clickbait
It is literally a quote from the interviewee
I don’t understand how a quote from the article can be click-bait? Because it is a sensational statement? Sure, but he said that. He made that statement. He believes it. FFS.
The Proton 11 beta already supports ARM and people are already playing games via Steam on ARM handhelds with Rocknix. GameNative is going to face an uphill battle. People are going to pick Proton over GameNative if it doesn’t have the same support and development as Valve dedicates to Proton.
Last game I tried to install through GameNative on Retroid Pocket 5 was Granblue Fantasy Versus. It kept crashing on startup. Guess I’ll let it cook for a while longer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It probably will, for some people, at least until Valve releases an ARM-powered Deck running full SteamOS.
I think Android is the weak link here. Who wants to use an increasingly locked down operating system?
Who wants to use an increasingly locked down operating system?
What’s the alternative? Keep in mind: we’re talking about a primary phone used for calls, texts, navigation, banking, payments, photography, and social media.
Yeah imagine spending all this time getting it all set up to one day have an update that breaks literally everything. That would suck…
And android seems to not get any better, just more locked down.
True, the only gaming focused custom rom I’m aware of is Gamma OS, and while it’s a great effort, the lone developer is not keeping up with the plethora of devices coming out.
Right now the Linux distros for these devices are weak JELOS-style barebones types. I’m looking forward to the days when I can run full fledged Debian-based distros on these.
The Steam Frame is ARM powered. They already released a beta of Proton 11 which can run on ARM. People already have tested it on ARM handhelds like the Odin2 with Rocknix and can launch the Steam store.
If it ends up running well on AYN Thor I might finally upgrade from my 3DS, but one of the only videos I saw tried running Hi-Fi Rush and it didn’t launch, all the other examples were indies which I assume are playable anyway.
I feel the same. Seems like you can easily install something like RockNIX on one of those handhelds running Android, but having a big name like Valve releasing an ARM-powered Switch Lite looking handheld would really push things.
Cannot remember when the last time was that I was that excited for the future of gaming :)
100%. An android device will recieve updates for 7 years in the best case scenario (on average more like 4 years), while a steamdeck is fully supported with mainline Linux, so it’ll continue to recieve support for 20 years at a minimum (support for 486 CPU’s from the early 90’s are only just now being dropped).
It’s not about who wants it. People are already in posesssion of this device. And a lot more are buying them - the number of windows pc users has been plummeting lately, and it’s not in favour of linux but mobile os’es. So if you already posses the device ( walled garden or not ) why not use it as a handheld.
Problem is this whole article reads like an ad:
In a surprisingly short amount of time, this project has gone from a curiosity commented on in social media to the bleeding edge of the entire conversation. They move fast. They don’t workshop; they ship. The attitude is less “what if” and more “here.”
Gimme a break with all this glazing.
the number of windows pc users has been plummeting lately, and it’s not in favour of linux but mobile os’es
Non-gaming PC/Windows users are going down, but PC gamers are at all time highs and still growing.
Considering that this is partially thanks to Valve’s support of the FEX translation layer (x86 to ARM) I think it’s inevitably the next step after testing the waters with the Steam Frame.
Bit of a conflict of interest from the quote, considering the quote in the title is from one of GameNative’s developers.
“North Korea will definitely be the most powerful nation in the world, that could replace every other country and government, says Kim Jong-un.”
GameNative is a FOSS project. I think you’re confusing it with GameHub.
I’m just wondering where the ‘conflict of interest’ is here?
It is a clear, attributable quote and perspective from the interviewee. What conflict?! Who else would the quote be from, when I am interviewing one person?
Edit. Yeah, doesn’t seem like you understand what a ‘conflict of interest’ actually is.
Not so much a conflict, but “my friend says his software is amazing” comes off as something of a fluff piece.
I imagine he would, yep.
The software is amazing, and is IMO currently beating out the competition in that space. There’s like 4 other apps do just about the same thing, and the beauty of it is that it depends a lot on open source code, so they’re all benifitng from one another.
No, not at all a conflict of interest.
Literally nothing at all, by definition, is a conflict of interest.
I don’t particularly agree with their conflict of interest comment on the quote, no. I guess it could be said that interviewing individuals that you have a personal relationship with could be a conflict around expectations of unbiased article writing, but this isn’t exactly the New York Times.
I’ve interviewed something like 50-ish dev teams/sole devs and projects now:
- Heroic Games Launcher
- Lutris
- RetroDECK
- PCSX2
- RPCS3
- Eden
…the list really does go on and on. And yes, I am or have since become friends with each of them. I find it odd that because I am friends, an interview might become somehow less. These are interviews which wouldn’t happen without me doing it. 75% of the ones I have done were with teams who never thought they’d get to share their story, and that’s a big part of why I do them. Too often people forget about those devs who are behind what they use and love so much.
This woudln’t be unbaised article writing regardless. I’m not writing an article. I write an intro, an ‘end’, I write the questions and organize a time when I can chat to the teams. There’s nothing to be unbiased about. At least in my mind. I appreciate what you’re saying, I don’t mean to come off as defensive or anything here, but it really stuck with me - how people here on Lemmy have taken the headline of this article as something which needs to be discounted.
“…but this isn’t exactly the New York Times”
But good point. No, it isn’t. Gardiner and I just run the site as a space where we can write about what we love. For me that is 99% gaming. We haven’t got ads, it runs by community donations (server space etc).
Ugh. Sorry, rant over.
It’ll continue being relevant for EGS, GOG, and Amazon games. I’m betting Valve is working on an Android app that makes the experience way smoother out of the box. Keep in mind that there’s plenty of games that aren’t looking like Ghost of Tsushima. There’s been a bunch of CRPG releases in the last decade. ARPG games too that aren’t hard to run. Victor Vran. Grim Dawn has an upcoming update
But there’s still enough hard to run games that games run through an x86 emulator will not be a real.replacement for the hard to run games. Going to at least need the day to come when devs commonly ship ARM binaries too
For a minute or so anyway, until the SoC overheats and thermal throttles.
You’re going to need a bigger battery and a real heatsink+fan if you want real gaming out of it, at which point it’s going to start getting to Deck size…
Uhm look at the Ayn Thor and Odin 3. It’s pretty much on par in a way smaller form factor. ARM is a game changer.
ARM isn’t the reason why it won’t work for long.
It’s cooling, as soon as the phone thermal soaks it’s throttles down - phones can’t have a decent cooling system since they use power (fans EAT power), degrade water resistance and just add weight/bulk that most don’t want in a phone.
The handhelds you’ve listed aren’t phones. They’re handhelds that do in fact have heatsinks - they’ll work fine.
Again this isn’t anything against ARM, it’s the idea that a phone form factor with zero cooling considerations will somehow best a device with those considerations.
Here’s the thing: Game Native allows for this sort of emulation of PC games on those handhelds. Yes, it works for like 10 minutes on a normal phone with heavier titles, but these handhelds are easily half the size of a steam deck while giving comparable performance sometimes already on these devices. That’s what the conversation is really about I feel. I don’t think anyone would even want to to play cyberpunk on their phone.
To me this article definitely reads like the author and those involved actually think the opposite of what you’ve said; That phones will beat out any kind of handheld because why have 2 devices.
Granted i didn’t do more than a cursory look at it.
To me this article definitely reads like the author and those involved actually think the opposite of what you’ve said
Do I? I certainly didn’t write that. I’m from a background where I spent around 2 years writing Steam Deck articles, guides and interviews, exclusively. I don’t like you framing me as someone dismissing the Steam Deck. Weird.
Granted i didn’t do more than a cursory look at it.
Ah, say no more. Now I see why you thought that.
At this point in time, with how expensive the Ayn Thor has gotten and the downgrade from UFS 4.0 to 3.1 (WITH a simultaneous price increase), that console is dead to me personally, unless prices return to normal (which won’t happen).
However, the future of portable gaming is absolutely in ARM based consoles. Given that the upcoming Steam Frame will come with ARM to x86 translation (FEX), I think that Valve is also aware of this, and that the Steam Frame is the tip of the iceberg and will act as a sort of testing ground for ARM.
I’m hoping that Valve creates a variant of the Steam Deck that runs on an ARM-based chip, in addition to a true Steam Deck successor console running on a normal AMD processor and GPU. I think that Android also adds unnecessary overhead when gaming (latency and CPU cycles), and SteamOS is a great answer to that problem.
While I think Ayn is currently out of reach price wise, more competitors will begin to pop up making similar things (e.g. Retroid Pocket Flip 2).
Yeah the price increase on the AYN sucks, but I brought them up as examples of great devices that run PC emulation quite well in a very small form factor (at least compared to PC handhelds).
Also I 100% agree that ARM is the future here, and that Valve is probably testing the waters with Steam Frame. It all fits in just way too perfectly. That being said, while I would hope to be wrong, I could imagine them completely moving to ARM and just not release a true Steam Deck successor at some point based on x86. Valve is kinda making history with not making direct successors with the Valve Index -> Steam Frame.
Good job on the headline, made me click. I found the full quote interesting:
Do you think GameNative might in some way redefine the way people think about PC gaming on portable devices?
Utkarsh: Yes, I do, and that’s the reason I’m choosing to work on it! I genuinely feel that in the next year or two, GameNative is going to become a complete replacement for handheld PCs like the Steam Deck, and in the medium-long term make expensive, bulky gaming PCs an anachronism.
This seems overly optimistic and there’s no mention about Valve actively working on fex as a possible precursor to the Deck2 or Deck3 being an arm powered device. Then there’s the problem of heat dissipation in devices that haven’t been designed with that type of sustained usage in mind. Will people buy bulkier phones without water and dust resistance in large enough quantities to be sustainable?
I’ve been excited about PC emulation on my phone and it has been a surprisingly good experience for most non-AAA games (except for the hit on battery life), but it’ll never be able to duplicate the immersion that only becomes possible on a large display with the necessary horsepower to bring the game to life. PC gaming isn’t going anywhere and neither are dedicated handhelds.
and in the medium-long term make expensive, bulky gaming PCs an anachronism.
This claim is a ridiculous overreach. There’s only so much computing power you can fit in a small space due to heat dissipation. You can’t beat thermodynamics. You can get a lot of games to run on lower end systems, but only if you’re willing to make a ton of compromises.
In no way are you going to be running something like Cyberpunk at 4k 60fps on a phone within the next 10 years. Thats what the “expensive, bulky gaming PCs” are for.
And I don’t get why they’re painting a target on the back of high end gaming hardware or even the Steam Deck. There’s another target that would be more beneficial to society to take out: consoles, particularly their locked-in ecosystems. Democratize gaming.
I don’t think the greater power of larger devices is being questioned. There just happens to be a threshold where a technically inferior but more accessible solution becomes “good enough” for most people that they never consider moving up.
Just look at mobile devices. Of everyone who accesses the internet, 75% do so via smartphone only. As someone who doesn’t even like desktops losing ground to laptops, that statistic scares me.
We know there’s a growing number of people who use their phone as their primary and only computing device. And the success of the steam deck is proof that a “good enough” experience can attract an audience. It is also likely that Valve is planning for a future where the Steam android app will be capable of installing and playing games locally without the 30% Google tax.
None of that will change the fact that gaming will always push technology forward with the need for faster CPUs and GPUs and that will never be the domain of phones where efficiency is king. There is no reason to worry.
We know there’s a growing number of people who use their phone as their primary and only computing device
There’s also some people moving in the other direction, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that grows. My parents only had their smartphones for years, but recently had me pick out a laptop for them because trying to use their phones for everything was a headache.
I think one thing to consider is that cost of living has been going up in the US with wages not keeping up. So budgets are getting tighter, and if you can only afford a single device to buy, you’re going to buy the phone, even if a PC makes a lot of things significantly easier.
None of that will change the fact that gaming will always push technology forward with the need for faster CPUs and GPUs
Tbh, I think we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns on video game graphics. Do we really need games to be any more photorealistic and power hungry than they are now?
That being said, I don’t think android phones are going to usurp this domain any time soon. Power requirements for 4k 60fps are way too high, and mobile devices simply can’t distribute enough heat to handle it unless there’s enormous bumps in efficiency. And advancements in chip design have seriously slowed down the past few years
I definitely think graphical fidelity is “good enough” now, but there’s still quite a bit of advancement available in other areas still drawing on the CPU and GPU, VR and local AI being a couple. I’ve been all in on VR since the Vive, and while I reject corporate AI as much as most people here, I do run local models occasionally and would like to have NPCs using the tech.
Tbh, I think we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns on video game graphics. Do we really need games to be any more photorealistic and power hungry than they are now?
Need? No. Want? Absolutely.
There are two interesting articles that have shaped my view on this:
I’m not hung up on who is right about 1000Hz vs 1800Hz, only that >=1000Hz at >=1000fps is the goal. We’re a long way away from that when the best gaming CPU can only manage ~600fps in CS2 at 1080p.
One of the digitalfoundry guys got hands-on time with a prototype monitor at CES and played a game at >500fps and while he couldn’t really convey what it was like, it was clear that the experience was very different than even playing on 360Hz displays.
We’re at least 2-3 hardware generations away from being able to push >1000fps with relatively simple games and much further away for AAA games. I think it’s something worth looking forward to.
No, people aren’t going to want 1000+fps in games. As someone else pointed out in the thread, 4k 60fps is <5% of builds in Steam hardware surveys. Going even higher framerates just adds more and more cost, with reduced returns.
If you could build a system that goes from 500fps to 1000fps, you’re theoretically reducing latency by 1ms (it’ll most certainly be less though). But how much more expensive is the 1000fps build? Based on tech trends the past few years, that’s probably going to be a lot more expensive, since architectural improvements of chips has slowed down over the past few years. Right now, Nvidia’s just pushing more and more power into their cards to get more performance, because efficiency has plateau’d
Add to that, the human eye only sees up to 500fps in ideal conditions. Why would you pay a bunch of money for extra framea that you physicall can’t see?
I’m not worried about the tech going away so much as the market percentage dropping to make enthusiast hardware more niche. Among other things, it makes enshittification in the space harder to fight.
Fair, but I don’t think that threshold will be passed by smartphones for at minimum a decade. If you want 4k resolution for games you need 10-12GB of VRAM minimum. By claiming that high-end PC’s will become pointless in 5 years suggests that the interviewee thinks that mobile chips will surpass those requirements.
Except even among most current PC gamers, the threshold isn’t that high. 4K is still less than 5% of the market.
Also, I’d argue “anachronism” isn’t the same as “pointless.” It’s just claiming that something that was once more common will become less common.
It’s just claiming that something that was once more common will become less common.
Eh… “Anachronism” more suggests that they’ll be considered “out of place”. But that’s me nitpicking
Well, anachronism most literally means “misplaced in time.” You can go two directions with that, something being more at home in the future or more at home in the past. The former obviously doesn’t apply here, and I would consider my wording identical to the latter. A reduction in belonging implies a reduction in commonness.
You don’t need 4k on a phone though, might make it more doable.
Way to entirely miss my point
Cyberpunk came out in 2020. Are there games from 2010 that you would be surprised to see running af full speed on a high-end smartphone?
Trying to push the narrative to focus on 2010 games feels a bit like moving the goalposts, but I’ll bite
Trying to run anything in 4k 60fps native still is challenging for a lot of systems today, even older titles. Anything with high fidelity like the Last of Us would be a problem.
Plus anything with a lot of characters on screen at the same time would likely be a struggle. I’ve done 4-person couch co-op of CoD: Black Ops Zombies on XBox 360 (the system it was designed for) and it got choppy due to the number of zombies and perspectives the CPU had to handle. Open world games could potentially end up in a similar situation.
Then you get games that usually end up modded a lot like Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas that would likely be trouble from the start, and modern graphics mods still require fairly powerful systems to handle well
Trying to push the narrative to focus on 2010 games feels a bit like moving the goalposts,
Why? Isn’t the comparable expectation for consideration of what high-end phones ten years from now could do with a six-year old game to ask what today’s high-end phones can do with sixteen year old games?
Moore’s Law was always a marketing gimmick, but progression of information technology has been a rather steady cycle of “next year’s model will be even better” that it strikes me as a good starting point.
Advances in computation have slowed significantly the past few years. Moore’s Law is generally considered to have been dead for the last decade. There’s a reason Nvidia keeps adding a higher and higher power requirement on their top-end cards the past 2 generations. They’re running out of potential for optimizations, and the main route for higher compute is to now throw tons of power at it.
A better way to look at it is the Steam Deck. It only works because the TDP is 15W. If you wanted to make it more powerful, you’ll need to figure out how to dissipate the extra thermal load. If instead you tried switching to ARM for increased efficiency, the extra layers of translation and emulation puts you about where you started, meaning you’d still need to throw more power at it to get more performance.
Metro2033
I don’t know about that. I’ve tried multiple games with it and none of them are working. I can get them working in Winlator, which GameNative is based on, but not GameNative itself. It’s possible that I could be using it wrong even though I’m using the same settings in both apps but I wouldn’t know because there’s no documentation for either of them.
The best I was able to achieve in GameNative was with a game made in a very old version of Ren’Py. I was able to get in game but I wasn’t able to actually play it because mouse inputs aren’t working and the controller inputs only work on the main menu. I know that the GameNative’s virtual mouse should be working because it works perfectly fine for closing error messages, it’s just not working in game for some reason.
It’s actually quite a shame that I can’t get GameNative working because it does have more options available than Winlator. This means that if I could get it working, then there might be some games that would better in GameNative than Winlator.
Have a look at my friend’s site:
It is a space where community members upload their experiences and ideal settings for the devices and games. I might be biased because he is a friend, but I can also say that objectively it is a wonderful space to double-check how you’re approaching things.
Filter your search by your device, and then on the far-right, click on each result’s ‘eye’ to see what the person’s recommendations are in there (I do hope this helps!)
I can try that website out. There aren’t that many entries for my device (Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE) and none of them are for games I’d want to play on android but I’ll try what they say and see if any of it helps.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE
Here’s the filter for just your device, if it helps:
https://www.emuready.com/listings?deviceIds=["fc4ef9e4-8df9-48b7-97b4-c9cace9a417f"]
I’m still not getting anywhere with the games I’m trying to play. None of them are listed, even for other devices, and I still can’t get any games working properly in GameNative regardless of whether I use the some of the configurations mentioned for other games on my device or the same settings I use in Winlator.
Also, that website seems pretty cool though. I’m not sure how much I’d be able to add because I’m limited to just Winlator for PC games on android until I can get a game working properly in either GameNative or GameHub but does EmuReady allow adult/NSFW games? I didn’t see any adult/NSFW games listed but I’m also not seeing anything about them either. Also, do they allow adding other emulators? There are several emulators and emulator-adjacent apps I’m aware of but aren’t listed.
I don’t see this replacing my Steam Deck, but it might open up some impromptu gaming here and there.
Thats the way I see it too.
A couple of really good on the god style games or something.
I agree with this take, was playing Gravity Circuit via GameNative on my Pixel 9 and my GameSir G8 Galileo. I am portably gaming with OLED and Hall Effect and it felt fantastic. If you primarily play lower spec indie games, its a no-brainer as far as i am concerned.
GameNativeOS when?
