One of the things that makes Android so popular is its PC-like versatility. One such example is emulating software designed for different architectures, such as playing a Windows PC game on your smartphone.
One of the most popular emulators for this is GameHub, by GameSir, a company known for its game controllers. GameHub (and similar service Winlator) is best optimized for Qualcomm Snapdragon-equipped Android devices, but it’s now gotten much better for MediaTek users.
GameSir has announced through GameHub that it’s bringing better support for MediaTek SoCs using Mali GPUs. Specifically, Dimensity 9000 to 9400 chipsets should now support DirectX9 to DirectX11 PC games “with performance comparable to Qualcomm Adreno, and even surpassing it in some scenarios.”
Some of the work involved improving Mali GPUs’ Vulkan implementation, missing drivers, and unstable shader compilers. The GameHub team has created a “code conversion mechanism” to convert DirectX instructions for Mali GPUs. Runtime optimizations were needed in cases where drivers didn’t work.
The team at GameHub has reached out to MediaTek to create Mali-specific drivers for PC game emulation. MediaTek’s Dimensity SoCs are very popular, but they’re not the only ones using Mali GPUs – Google’s in-house developer Tensor chips also use Mali graphics. They may also receive better emulation support as a result of GameHub’s collaboration with MediaTek.