Red Dead Redemption 2 has been made “playable” on a mobile phone by a fan. Whilst it has some issues, it runs and is an interesting thing to look at. For so long now, Rockstar Games fans have wanted to play GTA V on their mobile phones but Serg Pavlov decided to jump to a more demanding game, Red Dead 2.
First spotted by Videotech on Twitter (currently known as X), Pavlov posted a video to his YouTube channel showing Red Dead Redemption 2 running on his Red Magic 9 Pro smartphone.
This model is the latest and most powerful phone under the Red Magic sub-brand of ZTE. It’s a gaming phone brand that focuses on the most powerful chips and cooling plus big battery, and gaming software.
How was this possible?
Pavlov decided to run the mobox emulator on his Android-powered phone. Mobox is a PC emulator that allows Android devices to run Windows applications. Several tweaks were made to the software doing the handling and eventually RDR2 could be ran on a phone.
From the gameplay video shared by Pavlov, the game runs at around 10FPS but it fluctuates from 7-10 a lot. Some less demanding areas let it go up to 16FPS. Just by looking at it, this does not seem like a fun experience. That being said it is a marvel such a demanding game is running on a small mobile device.
There are more issues than just performance though. We can see graphical issues such as textures not loading in, physics not working as intended, black simmering marks, and even hear sound that stutters. The phone’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 CPU runs at around 70c and the GPU at 60c or so despite an external cooler used. This is quite hot for a phone but
In terms of graphics settings, everything was on low of course. Even resolution was set to just 960×540 in-game meaning it looks more like a Nintendo Switch game than Red Dead 2 on PC. Speaking of the Switch, another fan managed to get GTA V up and playing on the Switch. You can check out how that runs on Nintendo’s handheld here.
You can watch the full nearly 13 minutes of Red Dead 2 gameplay running on the Red Magic 9 Pro here. There are also additional videos on his channel viewable here.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was not the only game or even Rockstar title tested. GTA IV has a video on his channel among many others.
As for anything else Red Dead Redemption 2 and Red Dead Online related such as the current Event Month, stay tuned to RockstarINTEL.
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