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:
https://gardinerbryant.com/i-genuinely-feel-gamenative-could-replace-handheld-pcs/
Advances in computation have slowed significantly the past few years. Moore’s Law is generally considered to have been dead for the last decade. There’s a reason Nvidia keeps adding a higher and higher power requirement on their top-end cards the past 2 generations. They’re running out of potential for optimizations, and the main route for higher compute is to now throw tons of power at it.
A better way to look at it is the Steam Deck. It only works because the TDP is 15W. If you wanted to make it more powerful, you’ll need to figure out how to dissipate the extra thermal load. If instead you tried switching to ARM for increased efficiency, the extra layers of translation and emulation puts you about where you started, meaning you’d still need to throw more power at it to get more performance.