Equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip, an Android terminal has achieved the impossible: run Cyberpunk 2077. It’s spectacular, it’s unstable and it turns your device into a burning brick in a few minutes. See how it is possible.
We’re not talking about playing via Xbox Game Pass or GeForce Now. No, it’s native performance. The YouTuber ETA Prime shared a video where Cyberpunk 2077 runs directly on an Android smartphone.
The platform used for this thermal slaughter is a Redmagic 11 Pro. Under the hood we find Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 and 16 GB of RAM. To achieve this feat, we had to go through GameHub, an interface that uses translation layers similar to Proton on Steam Deck.
This layer translates x86 instructions from computers into the ARM architecture of our phones in real time. We use tools like DXVK to convert DirectX graphics calls to Vulkan, Android’s preferred API.
To go further
This emulator runs PC games on Android
Cyberpunk 2077 at 100 degrees
To get something smooth, you have to make sacrifices. The game runs at 720p with settings on minimum. We naturally oscillate between 20 and 30 frames per second. It’s honestly amazing for such a nervous title.
This is where scaling technologies come into play. By enabling AMD’s FSR 2.1 and image generation, the counter rises. We exceed 40, even 50 images per second. The game becomes visually fluid, almost like on a dedicated portable console.
The problem? The heat. Despite the Redmagic’s active fan and liquid cooling, the processor achieved 100°C. It’s crazy. At this temperature the device is no longer a smartphone, it is a public danger to your hands and to the longevity of its internal components.
Apart from the oven, the experience is not perfect. Generating images on a smartphone creates visual artifacts, this “ghost” effect that drools behind the characters. The RAM is 88% full and the battery is probably dying. We are clearly in the pure technical demo, not in daily use.
Above all, this experience proves that the gap between a PC and a smartphone is closing at a breakneck speed. If a mobile chip can digest the code of a triple A like Cyberpunk, it is because the optimization of the x86-to-ARM translation layers has taken huge leaps.
We are starting to see results close to what a Steam deck in “low consumption” mode. Tools from the Linux world now integrate perfectly with Android. This opens the door to a huge library of PC games that can finally run without heating up as much on more finely engraved discs.
You can also run PC games on Android with this method.
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