Eather PS2

 Ratchet & Clank is a nostalgic favorite of mine from the PlayStation 2, and one I was the most excited to play on my smartphone. While performance isn't perfect just yet, there are steps you can take to improve it. The video above is recorded on the OnePlus 9 Pro with the straight out-of-the-box AetherSX2 experience — that is, no tweaks or other changes were made.

 There are steps you can take to improve AetherSX2's performance, and in fact, the developer has been testing it a lot on their POCO F3 with the Snapdragon 870. There are a ton of settings you can tweak and play with, but there are only three that I've actually modified. The first setting you can tweak that arguably matters most is the GPU renderer. You can choose between Vulkan or OpenGL, and the performance you get will depend on the device you're using and the game you're playing. For example, you may have better luck using Vulkan on the MediaTek Dimensity 9000 instead of OpenGL. If you haven’t heard of the Khronos Group’s Vulkan Graphics API, think of it as an alternative to graphics APIs like OpenGL or OpenGL ES. It’s backed by companies like NVIDIA and Intel, and it’s intended to give developers more options when they’re programming cross-platform games. It also has a lower CPU overhead, which in turn can lead to better performance. As Tahlreth says, OpenGL is onl...

 There are really only two alternative emulators out there for PlayStation 2 emulation. One is Play!, a high-level emulator that doesn't require a BIOS to run, and the other is in violation of the license agreement of PCSX2. While AetherSX2 uses PCSX2 code, the developers of PCSX2 have given AetherSX2 their graces, explaining that, in essence, its core code is LGPLv3-licensed. To run AetherSX2, you'll need a 64-bit device, and the chipset must have "big" performance cores (the developer recommends at least a Snapdragon 845). You can play games either using Vulkan or OpenGL, depending on which performs best on your device, and you can hot-swap between the two while in-game. There are a lot of great features in AetherSX2, including internal resolution scaling, save states, multiple control schemes, and more. As already mentioned, we tested it while it was still in alpha, so your mileage may vary on performance. For example, Ratchet: Gladiator (known as Ratchet: Deadlock...

 PlayStation 2 emulation has been in a weird place on Android for a long, long time. While it's been possible to emulate the system on your smartphone using a certain emulator available on the Play Store, allegations of stolen code and unethical business practices meant many, ourselves included, refused to promote the app, even if it was the best way to play them. Now, AetherSX2 is the best way to play PlayStation 2 games on your Android smartphone. It's free, it's fast, and you can now download it from the Google Play Store. You just need a smartphone with top-of-the-line specifications. I ran some tests to see what games work and don’t, and the results are surprisingly excellent. I tested on the OnePlus 9 Pro on Android 12, which was one of the most powerful devices on the market for emulation at the time of this review, switching between Vulkan and OpenGL depending on where the game performed best. I tested the original Ratchet & Clank, Need for Speed: Underground 2,...