(Credit: THS/Steam)
Playing PC games on your Android phone is becoming ever more viable with apps like Game Native, which enable easy emulation and can now boost performance with support for Lossless Scaling's multi-frame generation, Tom's Hardware reports.
Although it doesn't work with all Game Native-supported games, and Game Native's Steam game support is far from universal, this could unlock enormous performance improvements for anyone looking to play their favorite PC games on an Android phone.
Frame generation was introduced for Nvidia's RTX 40-series graphics cards in 2022, but today it's supported by a range of AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards, and third-party solutions like Losless Scaling expand that support even further. By inserting AI-generated frames between natively rendered frames, it can massively boost frames per second, albeit at the cost of some input lag. And now the technology is coming to emulated PC games on Android.
Game Native introduced support for the feature in its latest update, but it's not a native component of the app and requires Lossless Scaling to function. It's currently $7 on Steam, and you'll be prompted to buy it when enabling the feature if you haven't already.
You need to activate it on a per-game basis, but once enabled, you can adjust the FPS multiplier and the "flow scale," which relates to image quality, and the option to enable performance mode, which uses a lower-accuracy frame generation model.
In internal testing, the Game Native developers found that on a phone that delivered 30fps in The Last of Us Part 1, switching on frame generation doubled the game's frame rate to 60. 3X mode saw it jump to 80, and 4X mode was able to get the game up to 100fps.
Those settings will likely introduce some AI artifacts in the generated frames, and there will likely be noticeable input lag at higher multiplier settings, but the performance is hard to deny. For weaker phones not designed to play high-end, AAA PC games, having frame generation as an option will make some games playable where they wouldn't otherwise be, or improve performance enough to make games feel far smoother.
Although the developers didn't discuss it, it's worth noting the effect such a tool could have on battery life. For phones, there's not much that drains their battery as fast as playing demanding games, and PC games designed for dedicated desktop and laptop hardware are certainly demanding. Using frame generation to boost FPS could let gamers play at lower settings to extend battery life, whilst still enjoying higher frame rates.