How to Run Any PC Game on Android: A Review of the GameHub Emulator

Last week, Hong Kong's GameSir released the GameHub app on Google Play — one of the most popular Windows game emulators for Android. GameHub emulator on Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. Photo: Pavel Urlapov / Wylsacom Media The Wylsacom Media team immediately pulled out their Android smartphones and tested the new app on the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max, OnePlus 13, vivo X300 Pro, vivo X200 Ultra, vivo X100 Ultra, and even the Google Pixel 10! Today, we will explain how the emulator works, share our experience of installing games on Android, and outline all the pitfalls. Hollow Knight: Silksong on the GameHub emulator. Photo: Pavel Urlapov / Wylsacom Media

Initial Setup

To launch the emulator, you will need to register a GameHub account or log in using your Google account or Apple ID. The emulator runs video games locally, but your personal data won't collect itself! If you don't like the idea of creating a separate account just for games, we recommend installing GameHub Lite. It can run offline, but you'll have to download it from GitHub yourself. Once registered, you will enter the main menu of the emulator. Here, you can import games directly from your computer via USB-C or download them from the Steam library, but for that, you will need to enter your Steam login and password. After double authentication, your entire PC game library will be displayed as a single list. Unfortunately, the emulator does not support grouping by categories and cannot sort the library alphabetically. You can only find the games you need through the search button! Titles tested by the emulator developers are marked with a green checkmark in the library; however, its presence does not guarantee that the game runs at 60 FPS or that its interface is optimized for small screens. Treat the checkmark more as a hope that at least the main menu will launch.

To install a game, you first need to click on its icon in the library and then tap the Get Game button. The emulator will then do everything automatically: it will first download the game client and then load the necessary Steamworks libraries and Proton compatibility layer components from Steam required to run it on your smartphone. The GameHub principle does not use a Windows emulator to run games on Android. Instead, it runs a Linux emulator in the background, downloads the games onto it, and launches them through the Proton compatibility layer, which allows games to run on the Steam Deck! The developers packed several nice features into the emulator. For example, GameHub can recognize input from multiple gamepads simultaneously, so fans of party games can gather friends with controllers around the smartphone while outputting the image to a TV via the USB-C port. For each individual game, you can select optimal compatibility settings and set a forced resolution in which the game will launch when you click the shortcut. By default, it is set to 720p, which will be optimal for most games. Most games are designed for 16:9 displays and do not work well with ultra-wide monitors, so you will have to play with black bars on the sides: this cannot be overcome yet. When switching to full-screen mode, the emulator prefers to stretch the image from edge to edge, making all characters amusingly wide.

What About Performance?

Indie games with 2D graphics work excellently: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Dead Cells, Peglin, and Cuphead load quickly, run smoothly, and hardly strain smartphones at 720p with a lock at 60 FPS. Even the tenth Pixel, significantly lagging behind its Chinese counterparts in performance, runs Heroes 3 at 30 frames, which is quite tolerable for a turn-based strategy. By the way, this is what the virtual keyboard looks like: The situation is more complicated with 3D games: titles from the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 eras launch successfully, but not all of them run stably. The indie horror Little Nightmares on the vivo X300 Pro delivers between 30 to 45 FPS on medium graphics settings while noticeably heating the smartphone! FlatOut 2, released almost twenty years ago, runs at 60 FPS on the vivo X100 Ultra. Classic parts of Grand Theft Auto, including San Andreas and Vice City, also work wonderfully, but they are natively available on Android without any emulators. However, even the top Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 could not handle Skyrim. In caves and dungeons, the frame rate hovers around 30 FPS, but in large cities, textures fail to load in time, resulting in a stutter-fest! Textures and geometry of buildings in Skyrim did not load at all.

Serious problems arise with games from the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One era: there is no pre-caching of shaders on the emulator, so launching graphically intensive titles becomes challenging for smartphones. Part of the system's resources is spent on emulation, part on the compatibility layer, part on rendering the game itself, and another part compiles shaders in the background. The result is quite expected: the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max delivers only 9 FPS on minimum settings in The Witcher 3. Unfortunately, the system requirements for most graphically intensive projects released after 2015 significantly exceed the capabilities of Android flagships. Even cute indie games like Stray require at least 8 GB of RAM and 2 GB of VRAM. The latter was launched on the vivo X200 Ultra, which houses last year's Snapdragon 8 Elite. The menu loads, but instead of gameplay, there's a black screen. The phone, according to the temperature sensor, heated up to 67 degrees. Dark Souls III behaves similarly on the vivo X300 Pro. As you might guess, trying to run new titles on Unreal Engine 5 with ray tracing on the emulator is pointless. Ironically, the main drawback of the emulator is its main advantage — GameHub installs the PC versions, meaning that before you can test whether a game works on your smartphone at all, you will have to download a heavy build with high-resolution assets, 4K textures, third-party launchers, and other frills. For comparison: the port of Assassin’s Creed Mirage for iOS takes only 13.7 GB of storage, while the emulator on Android requires downloading the hefty PC version weighing 40 GB. Hollow Knight: Silksong takes almost 8 GB, Little Nightmares — 10 GB, the third Witcher — 57 GB, and Grand Theft Auto V — 93 GB. Android flagships with microSD card support have long become an endangered species, so owners of smartphones with 128/256 GB will be able to fit a maximum of half a dozen indie games on their devices, but no more. Moreover, you cannot set three or four games to download overnight: after one of them finishes installing, the emulator automatically pauses all the others. Sometimes, the download of already heavy games is interrupted by a strange message saying "Network error," after which you need to manually resume the installation of all titles. The emulator's page on Google Play claims full support for Steam Cloud; however, cloud saves are pulled through inconsistently, and you can completely forget about the Steam Workshop mod loader on the emulator. Out of a dozen tested games, only five managed to load saves: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and three different parts of Assassin’s Creed. However, the latter pulled saves not from Steam but from its own Ubisoft Connect launcher. Even in those rare cases when saves did arrive on the phone, they refused to fly back to the cloud after the gaming session ended.

Another source of headaches is third-party launchers. Not all of them run correctly on the virtual machine, but those that do require mandatory authorization. Reading the tiny text in a window a quarter the size of a 6-inch screen is not much fun. Moreover, the virtual keyboard almost always overlaps the authorization window, so you can't even see what you're typing in the login and password fields. The same issue applies to the emulator's virtual desktop. It will be useful for installing mods and manually transferring saves, but due to scaling issues, seeing anything on it without an external display will be difficult. There are also problems with controls: in Assassin’s Creed Revelations and Assassin’s Creed 3, the emulator refused to recognize input from the virtual controller. Through experimentation, it was found that the bug is not related to the application itself but lies with the Proton compatibility layer. The problem was resolved by switching to an earlier version of Proton in the game settings. Additionally, GameHub does not support the Steam Input protocol, which is necessary for fine-tuning controllers. Without it, for example, you cannot play Half-Life 2 — the game simply does not recognize any input source unless it is processed through Steam Input.

A Foundation for the Future

Despite all its rough edges and shortcomings, GameHub can be a huge lifesaver for the average user! It fully automates all the technical complexities of deploying a virtual machine and setting up a gamepad. On one hand, its capabilities are more than enough to take your favorite indie platformer or an undemanding game from the early 2000s on a trip, leaving portable consoles at home. On the other hand, the issues with Steam Cloud synchronization have seriously undermined the purpose of emulating games on a smartphone for me personally. I love to 100% games: clearing side quests, searching for secrets on the map, and unlocking as many achievements as possible in one playthrough. Taking my Steam Deck on vacation, I can be sure that my latest saves from the PC will definitely arrive on the portable! And once I return from the trip, I can continue playing on my home computer exactly from where I left off while playing on the plane. Such luxury is not available on the emulator, and the game installed on the smartphone will most likely have to be played from the very beginning. It's disappointing! Due to the aforementioned problems, I cannot replace my laptop or even my Steam Deck with my favorite Android smartphone, but the foundation for the future is enormous! As the emulator improves, more and more games will be seamlessly supported, and who knows, Google might introduce its PC on Android with new hardware, opening up even more possibilities for emulation!

Source: GameHub on Google Play, App Store