Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t designed for mobile, but here’s a video showing the open-world game running on an emulator.

YouTube user Serg Pavlov was able to get the Windows emulator to work on his Redmagic Pro 9 phone. While Windows 11 can run Android apps, we haven’t even thought about the other way around (and Windows Phone hasn’t been around for a while; the Redmond-based company has given up on mobile-oriented Windows). Still, Pavlov thought he’d dream big, and not just get a small game to run on the phone, but something with much higher system requirements.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. There are no native ports (or patches) for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox series, so you can play the western adventure on those two consoles via backwards compatibility. How does it run on the Redmagic Pro 9? About as you’d expect: depending on the area, the frame rate is 6-15 FPS. In larger cities (e.g. Saint Dennis, Blackwater) you get single digit frames per second (aka: slideshow), but inside buildings you can get up to 15 FPS with an average performance of 10 FPS. In other words, it’s unplayable.

The phone used by the YouTube user is not a weak one, since it is intended for games. It’s no wonder that the Redmagic Pro 9 costs 650 euros on the company’s website, but it costs even more because he had to use an external cooling system, even though Red Dead Redemption 2 was running on minimum graphics settings. For a game released earlier, he had more success: Kotaku reported that Grand Theft Auto V (which came out in 2013; the PC port was released in spring 2015) reached 60 FPS in some places.

It will be interesting to see how Apple can deliver a mobile port of larger titles on the iPhone 15. This will not be an easy task as it will require excellent optimization.

Source: Kotaku, Redmagic