Xiaomi’s WinPlay System Runs Windows Games on Android
Despite the fact that mobile gaming has become one of the biggest sectors in the gaming market, I must confess that I've never been a dedicated mobile gamer. While I enjoy titles like Minecraft and a few city-building games, such as Pocket City, mobile games rarely satisfy my gaming preferences. Instead, I often play PC games on my mobile device via streaming services like Steam Link or Moonlight.
While game streaming has made significant progress in recent years, with latency decreasing dramatically, the technology still has its limitations. To address this issue, Xiaomi has introduced a new solution that enables seamless play of full Windows games on Android devices locally with no need for a network connection. Unlike tools like Winlator, Xiaomi's solution is specifically designed for gaming, boasting a remarkably low GPU performance loss of only 2.9%. A figure so specific it must be true. Critically, WinPlay even supports Steam right out of the box, ensure that your backlog is easily accessible.
In a different post on Weibo, Zhang Guoguang goes into detail as to how they’re pulling off this feat. As best as I understand it, we’ve got a virtualized mini-Windows running on the device and this mini-Windows is running in a more efficient than normal way due to their Xiaomi HyperCore proprietary kernel system. This allows them much deeper control of the device’s system, giving them precise control and therefore better efficiency. I think.
Xiaomi is currently asking for volunteers to test this system out, specially targeting users of their Pad 6S Pro tablet. This tablet runs on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, so this could serve as a sort of baseline minimum spec going forward. Even with this slighter older SOC, it’s said they have managed to run Tomb Raider Game of the Year edition at 45FPS while only using 8.3w of power. It’s important to note that we don’t know what graphical settings we’re looking at, so I would expect low settings.
Still, the chips in our phones and tablets are often underestimated and underutilized, so it’s very interesting to see Xiaomi try something like this. It’ll allow us to truly see just how powerful these devices actually are. If you’re using a device from the last year or so, it should run these games even better than this tablet. This app can use controllers as well as a keyboard and mouse combo, which is great to see.
Prominent leaker Digital Chat Station even shared a video of various games running quite well through this system. Very, very impressive.. For now, this is still in early testing with no word of a full release.