Android handhelds are running PS5 games now

Emulation’s nothing new on Android — with a little elbow grease, it’s fairly easy to get Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch games running on your phone or game handheld. Now, somebody’s even got PS5 games up and running on the AYN Odin 3.

Ghael, developer of the Lemon Switch emulator we covered last week, is back at it with CapyPS5. Based on the FEX x86-64 emulator and KytyPS5 PlayStation 5 translation layer for desktop operating systems, CapyPS5 is a work in progress, but Ghael’s already got a handful of PS5 games running well on Android.

Before you get too excited, this project isn’t going to let you run Death Stranding 2 or Marvel’s Wolverine on your Galaxy S23. Games currently workable in CapyPS5 include titles like Dead Cells and Blasphemous — relatively simple games that you wouldn’t be surprised to see on a phone. The project page shows a handful of 3D games, like Stray and Little Nightmares, do technically run on CapyPS5, but at single-digit frame rates most would consider unplayable.

These games were tested on the beefy AYN Odin 3, which is powered by the Qualcomm Dragonwing Q8, a version of the high-end Snapdragon 8 Elite. Ghael’s shared a couple of videos of games running within CapyPS5, including Dead Cells and Marvel Cosmic Invasion, both of which can be seen running at 60 frames per second. Dead Cells has some pretty obvious visual bugs, but the frame rate looks stable.

Don’t expect to see the emulator on the Play Store any time soon. CapyPS5’s page says the project is in alpha, with a version 0.0.1 APK available to download directly from the developer.