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:
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).
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.
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.
He’s saying that Android is locked down bloated and filled with spyware.
I think it was the steamdeck comparison that is drawing this response, as gamers finally have a device that isn’t restricted to a single OS and is completely under the users control.
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.
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).
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.
Thanks! It seems like the Reddit thread person has gotten F:NV to work, which was one of the games I tried with Game native to no avail. Maybe I gotta try this Winlator thing? Thanks again for your help!
Gamenative is absolutely sick but Android is also a PITA for handhelds these days. The kernels are always dated, the task management sucks, the UX sucks, and everything has to be ported into an APK with cruddy Android API mappings.
I have Rocknix dual boot on my AYN Thor, and it is so much easier to run native emulators on linux then to run the Android counterparts, which are guaranteed to be missing features or are out of date with upstream releases.
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
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 frames that you physically can’t see?
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?
Eyes don’t work in fps and the 500fps limit is a myth that is shown to be false in the linked articles. The need for >1000fps is more about how our brains perceive motion and getting as close as possible to eliminating judder.
Also, talking about costs isn’t really relevant when we’re talking about future tech. What is aspirational today will be the norm tomorrow. We’ll get there first with upscalers and mfg and who knows what else is in the pipeline to improve the rendering process.
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…
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.
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.
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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?
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).
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.
Fuck android, last thing I want is more locked down devices bloated and filled with spyware.
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.
He’s saying that Android is locked down bloated and filled with spyware.
I think it was the steamdeck comparison that is drawing this response, as gamers finally have a device that isn’t restricted to a single OS and is completely under the users control.
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.”
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.
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:
…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 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.
Sure, that’s not to dismiss the valuable work and high effort you’re putting in to having these conversations that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
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!
Thanks! It seems like the Reddit thread person has gotten F:NV to work, which was one of the games I tried with Game native to no avail. Maybe I gotta try this Winlator thing? Thanks again for your help!
Gamenative is absolutely sick but Android is also a PITA for handhelds these days. The kernels are always dated, the task management sucks, the UX sucks, and everything has to be ported into an APK with cruddy Android API mappings.
I have Rocknix dual boot on my AYN Thor, and it is so much easier to run native emulators on linux then to run the Android counterparts, which are guaranteed to be missing features or are out of date with upstream releases.
Good job on the headline, made me click. I found the full quote interesting:
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.
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.
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.
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
Need? No. Want? Absolutely.
There are two interesting articles that have shaped my view on this:
https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters-law-amazing-journey-to-future-1000hz-displays-with-blurfree-sample-and-hold/
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/perfectillusion.pdf
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 frames that you physically can’t see?
Eyes don’t work in fps and the 500fps limit is a myth that is shown to be false in the linked articles. The need for >1000fps is more about how our brains perceive motion and getting as close as possible to eliminating judder.
Also, talking about costs isn’t really relevant when we’re talking about future tech. What is aspirational today will be the norm tomorrow. We’ll get there first with upscalers and mfg and who knows what else is in the pipeline to improve the rendering process.
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.
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.