ARMSX2 Refresh brings great news for PS2 emulation on older Pixels

ARMSX2 Refresh was released roughly two weeks ago, and the PS2 emulator has seen a steady stream of updates since then. A recent update also brings great news if you’ve got a device with Arm’s Mali graphics.

ARMSX2 Refresh version 2.3.5 was released on GitHub yesterday, and it fixes a major crash on Mali GPUs. More specifically, the emulator would crash on Mali-powered devices when you tried booting a game with the Vulkan renderer enabled.

“This should improve performance for Mali users!” reads an excerpt of the changelog.

I tried an earlier version of ARMSX2 Refresh on the Pixel 9 Pro XL and found that the app would indeed crash when you selected the Vulkan renderer and tried launching a game. However, these same games booted up just fine with the latest update.

This fix is great news if you’ve got a MediaTek-powered device or an older Pixel phone. Vulkan is often (but not always) the preferred graphics renderer when running more demanding emulators on non-Snapdragon devices. In fact, it usually brings a speed boost to Snapdragon-powered devices too.

This isn’t the only notable ARMSX2 Refresh update in recent days. Version 2.3.2 of the app was released a few days ago and brings the ability to choose sub-native internal resolution options. That means you can run games at 0.25x, 0.5x, or 0.75x of the original output resolution. That’s ideal for budget devices, as the ability to run games below the native resolution should result in improved performance.

These updates all apply to ARMSX2 Refresh on GitHub rather than the standard ARMSX2 release on the Play Store. The version on the Play Store uses code translation (x86 to Arm), which inherently has a performance penalty compared to the native Refresh app.