Someone Got Red Dead Redemption II (Kind Of) Running On A Phone

Phones are getting more and more powerful with each passing day, but it’s still impressive to see someone running Red Dead Redemption II or Grand Theft Auto V on a mobile device, even if performance isn’t as good as it would be on a PC or console.

YouTuber Serg Pavlov has been uploading videos showcasing themselves testing out various PC games on the Red Magic Pro 9, a powerful $650 Android phone designed for gaming. And the results are quite impressive. Using a Windows PC emulator running on the phone, Pavlov has tested dozens of games and recorded how they performed, the settings used, and documented all of the tests in a spreadsheet. Some games, like GTA IV, run impressively well with the game hitting 60fps during gameplay. Other titles won’t even start, like 2018’s God of War on PC. And then you have a game like Red Dead Redemption II, which does technically run on the powerful phone (which is connected to an external cooler). However, don’t expect 30fps or nice textures.

As spotted by VideoTech on Twitter, Pavlov has gotten Red Dead Redemption II running on the Red Magic Pro 9, but it’s barely playable. In the videos showcasing Rockstar’s open-world game running on the device, you can regularly see the performance dip into slideshow territory even with settings turned all the way down.

But this is in fact Red Dead Redemption II, the full game, running on a phone using an emulator. Even if it runs poorly, it’s still a cool proof of concept and a sign of how quickly phones are catching up to PCs and consoles in terms of raw power. As some commenters have pointed out, their older PCs can’t even run Red Dead Redemption II and yet this phone (sort of) can.

We’ve seen Apple push harder and harder to bring big games like Resident Evil Village and Death Stranding to newer iPhones with mixed results. It’s clear that phones, even the high-end and powerful ones, are still incapable of perfectly playing some of the biggest games released in the last few years. Yet these tests Pavlov is uploading show that we might not be that far away from a big game like GTA 6 launching on consoles, PCs, and phones at the same time.

At the very least, these videos have convinced me that Rockstar should release a native version of Grand Theft Auto IV to the Google Play Store so fancier phones can play around with it and not have to mess with an emulator.

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