Peak Android Gaming Hardware - Switch, PS2, Vita, 3DS & More

Hey guys, Taki here. We’ve been looking at high-end Snapdragon hardware over the last few months, and we have another powerful device to take a look at today. This thing features the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, which has enough power to handle just about anything that is out there for Android at this point from GameCube, PS2, and Switch. Like most of the recent Snapdragon releases, this is one that will get better with time as open-source drivers release and allow us to emulate PC games, b

ut right now, it’s pretty awesome. Let’s get started with the specs. The ROG Phone 8 Pro comes with the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor. This is the highest-spec device that I have with this processor, and it comes with an absurd 24GB of LPDDR5x RAM. This is physical RAM, and you will be hard-pressed to max this out with the current software that is available on Android. More on that later. For storage, we have 1TB of UFS 4.0, which gives us plenty of space to store a large collection of ROM

s across all of the systems that this hardware can handle. The only spec that stands out is the 165Hz AMOLED display with a resolution of 2400 x 1080. All of this runs on Android 14. Let’s start by doing a quick overview of some of the hardware on this. This is actually not the only ROG Phone that I own. I also own the ROG Phone 1 and an interesting fact for all of you out there is that this phone was used extensively during the R&D stage of Odin. This was used as a comparison basis for a lot of

the low-level system configuration, as well as some of the software ideas that were improved upon in Odin. Anyway, if we look at the two of these side-by-side, there’s an obvious shift in design language from this first interaction to the latest one, and you can see that play out very clearly by looking at the back. The back of the ROG Phone 8 is more of a stealth gaming device now than their previous models. If we just remove this logo and some of the tags from this along with the company logo

, you wouldn't really notice that this was a gaming phone at with this color option. Even with those, It doesn't stand out from modern phones and I think that's really what they were going for. The first one was no doubt a gaming product, but that segment of the market is super competitive now, and the user base just isn’t as big as the mainstream market. From that standpoint, it kind of makes sense to create a better version of a mainstream phone with a lot of gaming features that you wouldn’t

find in those phones and then hope for the best. One of those features is a second USB type C port, that opens up some unique possibilities with specific types of controllers. The primary USB port is on the bottom, but it is over to the side. As you can imagine, this is not ideal for some of the type c controllers that are out there, but I have to imagine they are aware of this. This is par for the course with gaming phones these days, but this guy also does not support an SD card slot. I know s

ome of the reasons why they don’t add this functionality in a gaming phone, but I kind of wish that they would because it’s easier to move a ROM collection from device to device. Other than that, we have a loudspeaker and a headphone jack. On the top half, we have two pressure sensitive air triggers that can be configured in software. I’ll show this off later in the video. One thing that I like about the back half beyond the physical texture, is this customizable LED display. This is not super u

seful when you are in a game, but it’s a cool touch and it can show you some useful information at a glance if you tend to leave your phone face down. If you are feeling creative, you can add your own animations to this, or you can just animate some text. It’s not going to give us that RGB FPS increase, but it’s pretty cool. The next thing that's worth talking about here is the 165Hz screen. This thing is competing with phones that have 60-120Hz refresh rates. Going from 60 to 120 is a big jump

in supported games, but going from 120 to 165 is not that noticeable. There are also not a ton of games that will even let you select a refresh rate that high. But when you do find one that lets you uncap your FPS, year, it looks amazing. Here we have Minecraft Java edition with the settings maxed out at 11 chunks. I'm standing on this pillar here and you can see the FPS in the corner and this is able to easily get of 165 FPS in this game. Outside of stuff like this, the main place where you wil

l see this benefit is just from the system UI. This won’t benefit us when we switch over to emulation. For Android games, most titles that you will see will be locked to 30, 45, or 60 FPS. Hopefully, that will change in the future. You will notice one thing about this screen, and it’s that this game is not full-screen. There are a few different ways that you can display content with this system. You can full screen, shift over from the front-facing camera, or crop into the center like I have it

here. But it is nice to see. I think it's going to take a while for games to just catch up across the board and allow you to be able to use tech that you have. Now. You'll notice one thing here that the game is running without taking out the full screen. There are a couple of different ways you can play games. What you see right here, it was done by the actual app. You can do this kind of thing here or you can shift it from the camera or you can do full or you can do full screen. This crop view

is nice, but I wish they set the black border to be fully black so it would be off. Right now, it’s dark gray. When you find a game that works well with the full-screen view, it looks awesome, especially if you can run the game that you want to play above 120 FPS. Obviously, we don't have any internal cooling on this, and depending on how you use it, it can get pretty hot to the touch. We'll talk more about that in just a bit. ROG uses external coolers with their gaming phones, and this one is t

he latest. This one is going to work like a standard cooler, but it does have the ability to be controlled by the Android system. This thing has 2 physical buttons on the top, along with an RGB light and the cooler mechanism. The bottom has a Type C port for charging and for powering the coldest mode on this, along with a headphone jack. We also have a little stand to prop this up on a table. The unfortunate thing about this is that this would make a decent performance dock, but these ports woul

d need be located in the back. The second thing is that this Type-C port does not allow you to use DP video output, and you also can’t do that from the side port. So there’s no hope to use this in a console mode with active cooling. When you're ready to use it, all you need to do is clip it into place, slide that down, and then it should tell you that you're in the cooler mode. If you interact with the system UI and you go over here to this, you'll be able to toggle a few modes without supplying

additional power. Between the highest and lowest mode that you can use like this, we use about .8W of power. If you play games that need screen mapping and you don’t want to use a controller, the two buttons on the cooler work well once you map them to in-game options. Thankfully, the controller that I'm going to use already has a cooler built in the back that works very well, and it also will not stop me from being able to do video output when I want. That’s what I will use for most of this vi

deo. Even though I won’t be using it, I want to test the effectiveness of their cooler. Right now I have this sitting in kind of like a torture test. I have the clocks maxed out as much as the software will allow me to do. You will see that it says it's 40 Celsius. I think that's the skin temperature on the back of the phone. The actual CPU die should be way higher than that based on the GPU reading. But I’m going to leave this here for a while until it throttles and check the readings. That did

n’t take that long. If we look at the back, we can see a hotspot of 62 Celcius where the cooler would go, and we are close to 50 Celsius at the edge. After using the cooler for about 15 minutes or so, our system went back to max clocks, and our skin temperature sensor went down by 8 Celsius. There’s not a big change on the front half, but the metal edge went down to around 50C from the mid to high 50s. I think the most valuable comparison that I can do in this video is to compare to to the red m

agic 9 Pro I have the highest end version of the red magic 9 Pro and I think I have the highest end version of the r Phone 8 because these both have the same processor benchmark scores are not going to be that different this one will be able to sustain that high performance a lot longer than this because it does have that fan in there that can ramp up very high but for gaming situations you can play the same kind of games on both of these without any problems in terms of like the UI and the syst

em they both have their own strengths and weaknesses they're also both supported by the manufacturer for about the same time they've promised to do two major Android releases on this Rog phone red magic will do at least one Android release and then they'll just do security patches after that all the red magic phones that I have still get security patches to this date they're just not that fast at doing the feature releases now even though the hardware is the same there are some things in the sof

tware that are not the first major one that we have is the performance modes so I have these both set so you can see all the information at a glance if we swipe over on the red magic you can see that we have a couple of different modes to go through I have it on Diablo mode right now but we also have balance and rise on red magic phones on the Rog phone we have something similar called The X mode but we also have something called Dynamic mode which is kind of just like leaving things as a defaul

t and then you also have a battery saver so all of these things are similar but the Nubia phones have something called Diablo mode and that's going to lock all of your frequencies to the max clocks possible and they will not go down unless the phone is going to be like reaching a critical temperature so in this case the redmagic 9 Diablo mode can't run this game at 8X native doing this is kind of pointless but I needed something that would stress both of these equally if we use the X mode on the

Rog phone you can see that we don't have enough power to match the other phone but we can go over here into this mode and then go into the advanced settings in this new menu there's a lot going on that I'm not going to go over but I do just want to go over this custom profile feature if I open this up we now have a ton of stuff that you would typically only see on a rooted phone you can customize just about anything that you want here and I've never seen another phone that gives you this kind o

f control out of the box this feature lets you do a lot of interesting things so for example I have a couple of profiles here I have one that will max out the CPU I have another one that will max out the CPU and the GPU and then I have another one that will just leave everything at the minimum clocks possible to get the best battery life possible and if I just select that profile you'll see that all my clocks go to the minimum level we obviously don't have enough power to play this game but this

shows you the level of customization that you have available to you here the great thing about this eco mode that I have here is this is enough power to be able to emulate a ton of things like way more than you'd expect and a lot of Android games will run just fine but this doesn't generate any heat and the battery life is amazing but let's just go over to my Max profile and again this is kind of highle stuff but Max is essentially just allowing us to get the most power out of this that we can

essentially it should give us the same performance as the Diablo mode on the Nubia phone the only problem is it doesn't allow us to set the CPU 7 to the highest clock of 3.3 GHz as you can see when I select it and then I back out it will apply but then it resets down to a lower frequency even though this game isn't running on either phone at 60 FPS we can see what kind of impact this has it's a small impact but it is still there the red mag magic phone is running at 54 FPS but the Rog phone is r

unning at 53 FPS because that CPU 7 isn't clocked as high as it should go this should be something that's super easy for them to fix in software but yeah I wish other phones and other devices gave us this kind of control out of the box because there's a lot that you can do here the other major difference between the two of these Beyond just like the refresh rate change is how they handle video out on the red magic phone you have two different choices that you can go with you can mirror your phon

e screen to an external display or you can send a different video signal to an external display this is obviously great if you want to turn this into a console and they've also added some other software in here to make it more of a gaming console on the Rog phone you'll only be able to mirror your screen you can use some external software to be able to give you like a DEX like experience but it's not as good as if Rog had just done this themselves personally I hope ROG adds something like this i

n a software update because it would be a killer feature on this In this section, let’s take a look at some Android gaming performance on the Rog Phone 8. Even though we are rocking bleeding-edge tech with this, we will be locked out of some graphical options in popular titles that opt for whitelisting specific phones. It’s kind of unfortunate that app developers do this, but they do and it sucks. Anyway, let’s get into the tests. For all of these games, I set the highest graphical options that

the game would allow me to select, and I used my custom max CPU and GPU profile if I needed more performance. Before today, I have only ever filmed an emulation test on the 8 Gen 3 processor one time, but I wanted to include a bigger variety of games for this showcase. This processor is extremely powerful, and if you customize it with the custom CPU and GPU controls, you can make it very efficient. For example, with PS1 set to 9x internal resolution, we can get between 18-22 hours of battery wit

h the brightness set to around 80%. That’s crazy. Anyway, we are going to skip over these lower-end systems because they all run flawlessly on this hardware. Our first system for this section is 3DS with the Citra emulator. I have the rendering resolution set to 4x native, and we are using Vulkan. From this point forward, I will aim to use my max CPU and GPU profile for the rest of the tests just to get a best-case representation of this hardware at this time. There was a recent update to the Vi

ta3K emulator for Android, so I wanted to a quick showcase of it on the 8Gen3 processor. With the exception of this first title, these games were run at 1x native resolution. Now let’s take a look at GameCube emulation. I targeted 4x native resolution using OpenGL in the official Dolphin emulator for these titles. That gave me better performance than Vulkan for some of the games that I wanted to test. Even though we have a ton of power here, there are still some games that push this hardware. Fo

r Wii, we are sticking with the official dolphin emulator at 4x native resolution. We only have a handful of games for this PS2 section. For this, I am using the latest public build of the AetherSX2 emulator, and I have the games running at 4x native. Our last system for this video is Switch. This is one that is not great now, but it will be in a few months from now. At this point, you will face a mix of things. Some simple games will run without any issues at all, others will have rendering iss

ues or missing graphics as is the case with this Doom Eternal footage, other games will look fine, but won’t work correctly, other games will run fine except for some flickering. Skyrim is the biggest offender of this that I’ve seen. Even though the game is running very well in this footage without that flickering issue, it’s not stable and it can randomly crash. Crashing is the biggest issue that you’ll find across the board, so I wouldn’t play games on this that don’t allow you to make frequen

t saves, it’s just not worth it at this time. But Switch is currently the pinnacle of what this hardware can do. A couple of months from now, you’ll see Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phones plowing semi-modern PC games, but right now, Switch is king. But that’s going to wrap up things on this review of the ROG Phone 8. If you enjoyed this video leave a like and subscribe to the channel, and if you want to see more 8 Gen 3 coverage, take a look at a recent video that I did on the Red Magic 9 Pro. Happy gami

ng everyone, Taki out.