PPSSPP (Unofficial) CPU Requeriments for Android

[GuilhermeGS2]

Warning: the informations below are not official, this has been made by myself based on my own testing and researchs. This is not sure you can run the emulator in the descripted conditions.

These requirements are for new OpenGL threading which is in most recent builds and future official v1.6.

Cortex A53 @1.5GHz cores or better, it'll be enough to run most 30 FPS games and some light 60 FPS games, such as Soul Calibur Broken Destiny, Ridge Racer 2, Dragon Ball Z Shin Budokai.

(Examples: current Galaxy J/A series Exynos, most low/mid-range Mediatek, Snapdragon 610, 615, 616 and 617).

For games such as GTA Vice City and Liberty City Stories, Tekken 6, Gran Turismo, will be needed Cortex A53 @2.0GHz cores or better.

(Examples: Mediatek P20 series, Snapdragon 625 or better).

Some CPU-intensive games such as both God of War's, Midnight Club LA and 3, and other 60 FPS games, might require a more powerful CPU, at least Cortex A57 cores or even Cortex A72. Most Cortex A57/A72/A73 devices support Vulkan, which is faster than OpenGL and can be used instead.

(Example: old Snapdragon 800 SoCs, Snapdragon 650 or better, Mediatek X20 series, NVIDIA Tegra K1 and X1).

For Vulkan, Cortex A53 cores @2.0~2.5GHz should be good enough for most games even the CPU-intensive's, but due to bad driver optimization the requeriments can be close to these for OpenGL threading depending on the optimization level. Anyway, as said before, the most SoCs supporting Vulkan also have Cortex A57/A72/A73 cores that are more than enough.

P.S.: CPU thermal throttling can affect performance in different levels, some devices might have better performance than others with same specs due to manufacturer's software limitation/optimization.

[Clariska]

For me it depends on the game i run.I got an old 2014 sony xperia e1.Not the best phone but the most reliable one i have seen in years.I run a game like class of heroes limited to 30 fps fine but a game like ff crisis core just phails(only run it for test purposes as pc are way more stable)

[GuilhermeGS2]

Well, I do not mean a phone with slower CPU than Cortex A53 1.5GHz won't run, I mean this will be enough to play most game safelly, like Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII. I also said 1.5GHz because I know many phones can throttled to 1.0-1.2GHz, that also would be fine for a couple of games.

In my tests, for example, I could run GTA Vice City Stories full speed almost all time with my CPU running arround 1.7GHz. I recommended 2.0GHz because one of the CPU cores is always in higher load than others, a little increase in CPU usage or a thermal throttling can cause FPS drops.



In this screenshot I'm using 1xPSP resolution to avoid GPU bottleneck, with 2xPSP the GPU usage is higher and also can cause FPS drops in some places.