【Mobile China Review】As the only two-day long holiday in China, the travel fever of the "Eleventh" National Day has always been the hottest, not to mention that this year is the Mid-Autumn Festival + National Day two-in-one 8-day super long holiday. Therefore, it is not surprising that the author did not grab a ticket to travel, and could only stay at home for 8 days purely.
In order to kill the boring time during the holiday, the author took out the long-ashed Switch, but the sky did not go as expected, and the few cassettes I owned had had already been coiled out of the pulp, and the price of the "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", which I still coveted and had been reduced to the old style, was still firm.
In line with the highest principle of "iron rooster", the author naturally cannot "break the vow" for this 8-day long holiday. So with my "unremitting efforts", I finally found a way to play Switch games for free, that is, the "flat replacement" model, but if according to the price, it should belong to "expensive replacement".
Gaming mobile has a role to play, simulation games are free to play
Everyone has a mobile phone, everyone has played mobile games to a greater or lesser extent, and in recent years, the internal volume of mobile phones has led to a significant increase in its hardware performance, far exceeding the hardware performance of the Switch console launched 7 years ago, so you can use the Switch emulator and gamepad accessories to run Switch games.
In order to save trouble, I directly chose the Red Devil 8 Pro+ gaming phone, after all, this machine is different from other mobile phones, it has an official matching shadow blade controller.
At present, although there are not many apps that can simulate Switch on mobile phones, but they are basically easy to find, the author selected a famous emulator called "a certain egg" to try, the specific name of the software The author will not disclose here, after all, this is just a feasible attempt, from the copyright point of view, it is not recommended that everyone do this.
If you want to play Switch games on your mobile phone, it is not enough to have an emulator app, you also need to download the game data by yourself, and then import it to the folder where the game is stored in the emulator before you can run the game normally. However, at this time, the "normal operation" is only through the virtual button to play the game, if you want to use the physical controller to play, you also need to carry out the controller connection and key mapping.
The simulation operation has high power consumption and has not been poorly adapted
Before testing, let's first look at the parameters of both. The Switch Lite was released on July 10, 2019, and it uses the NVIDIA Tegra X1 chip. The chip integrates four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores, the same as the Snapdragon 810 and Samsung Exynos 7 series.
Red Devil 8 Pro+ was released on December 26, 2022, it uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen2, the CPU of this chip uses a 1+4+3 octa-core architecture, including a 3.2GHz ultra-large core Kryo Prime core (based on Cortex-X3) to provide high single-threaded performance. There are also four performance cores running at 2.8GHz to better handle multithreaded workloads. The last three efficiency cores have a frequency of 2.0GHz.
From the paper data, the strength of the Snapdragon 8 Gen2 is undoubtedly crushed. But from the actual effect, the result is the opposite.
Red Devils (top), Switch (bottom)
Take the game The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild as an example. When running on a mobile phone, the default frame rate is only 30 FPS, and even if the performance setting is maximized, the frame rate can only rise to about 45 FPS at most, and it is very unstable, most of the time it is in the range of more than 30 frames. In this comparison, the Switch's maximum 60 FPS that has remained unchanged for 10,000 years does not seem to be so unbearable.
Looking at the picture quality, although the screen resolution of the Red Magic 8 Pro+ phone is 2480×1116, because the way the game runs is an emulator, when the setting is turned to the highest, its real picture quality display is still not comparable to the Switch Lite handheld with only 720P. And due to the problem of the mobile phone screen ratio, the game characters are also stretched more shorter.
Although the display is not satisfactory, it really impresses me in terms of the smoothness of the game's operation. In addition to the occasional frame drop that the author can't feel, the whole game runs very smoothly, and due to the various settings built into the simulator, it can also make the game "speed up" as a whole, whether it is process animation, or running pictures to fight monsters, as if turning on the accelerator.
However, the phone is not a Switch handheld after all. Simulation operation will increase the operating burden of the mobile phone. After 30 minutes of playing, the screen was noticeably hot. It can be seen through the temperature gun that the temperature on the front of the mobile phone has reached 43°, while the highest temperature on the back has reached 46°. The premise of this situation is that the mobile phone has turned on the active cooling fan for cooling.
Red Devil phone temperature situation
On the other hand, Switch Lite handheld, also after 30 minutes of gameplay, the highest temperature on the front is only 37.9°, and the back is 37.4°, which is basically the same as the human body temperature. It can be seen that the hardware is not the most important, and exclusive optimization is "deadly".
Switch Lite temperature situation
The Switch console, which has not been updated for 6 years, although it has an absolute hardware difference from the current newer mobile phones, but the result is that the poorer performance Switch is better in games. This is ultimately due to problems with system operation logic and adaptation.
Most of the Switch's games are based on the system, which can be said to be a perfect fit. The use of mobile phones to carry out such games is to build a Switch system platform on the Android system, and then run the game on this platform, so the "layer by layer" mobile phone, its load will be larger and more. And the game design was not born for the simulator at the beginning, and the adaptability is naturally not comparable to the performance of the Switch console itself.
In addition, the PS5, Xbox game consoles, etc. similar to the Switch, their games are directly run on the machine's system, running more directly energy efficiency, and the optimization effect is better, so such next-generation game consoles can rely on more "backward" and "low-performance" hardware to perfectly run console games.
epilogue
Overall, running Switch games from a mobile phone is not a long-term option, only suitable for temporary experimentation. And due to the buyout sales method of console games, some players are discouraged from the games they are interested in, or they do not like it after buying a trial, so they can only change hands at a low price.
In this case, for friends who are afraid that the game bought at a large price will become a dusty existence, it is a more secure and rational choice to try the game for a short time through the "non-genuine" way of mobile phone emulators, so as to decide whether to buy the game.
Also, if you want to experience console gaming in different ways, this mobile simulator approach is just one of the less costly options out there. As for other ways, handheld Windows games, which are currently starting to go mainstream, are also a good choice. Whether it is the GDP of a small factory that has been deeply cultivating in this field, or a large factory such as Asus ROG and Lenovo Savior that has begun to enter the game, there are different models for you to choose. Of course, this way of playing is more expensive.
In short, it mainly depends on what kind of game choice you want, whether you want to spend more or less, whether you want a more professional game handheld, or a shallow trial tool.