Best phone for emulating?

[Dragonracer21]

Hey guys,

I have been thinking about which phone I should buy for good emulation results in Dolphin (and maybe also citra, play! and so on). My Plan is to buy the Xiaomi Mi 11 with the Snapdragon 888 SoC, which is sadly very overpriced in Germany (799 euros and 800-850 euros if it would be through a mobile phone contract), the Oppo Find X3 Pro would also be an option because it is cheaper here and also has the same chipset, but better results in the Antutu benchmark test.

Other way cheaper Option would be a Xiaomi Poco F3 with Snapdragon 870 SoC but wouldn't bring performance like as the Snapdragon 888 SoC. My Questions are now: Which phone would be only for performance/speed the best one to buy?; is it worth to buy one of the much more expensive phones with Snapdragon 888 SoC? Or wouldn't there be much difference between the SD 888 and SD 870 in terms of emulation? Do the results of Antutu benchmark even matter for emulation purposes?

best regards and stay healthy

PS: Sorry for my English

[LG Fanatic]

The Snapdragon 870 is basically an updated 865 plus. The 865 performed great with many if not most Gamecube and Wii games. It also works quite well with Citra. So, if you wish to save some money, definitely go with the Poco FE.

[Nintonito]

The Mi 11 has demonstrable issues keeping the 888 cool (this isn’t really the phone’s fault as the chip is simply a furnace and a very poor design). The poco F3 will likely get you similar emulation performance in the real world for that much lower price.

[Pimenov]

The best SoCs for emulators are of course Snapdragon 855/865 on the ROG phone or Vivo flagship (the other 855/865 powered phones throttle a lot), but, of course, 888 is more powerful but most phones are too hot for comfortable gaming. Unfortunately, they are all overpriced.

The best phones for money are Snapdragon-powered 712, 720G, 730(G), 732. But you may need to tweak a few settings if the GC/Wii games perform slowly.

I use a Redmi Note 9 Pro with SD720G, it runs many GC/Wii games very well. Some games struggle and you need to tweak a few settings to accelerate them.

[Aggro_hamtaro]

Absolute best phone for emulation right now?
That would be the Asus ROG 5 hands down.

Now on a more practical day to day note, I would probably advise you to wait until Qualcomm gets to use TSMC'S more efficient fab processes, like the others have said - if you don't go for the Asus ROG 5, most phones won't be able to sustain the snapdragon 888's performance.

[Dragonracer21]

I dicided to buy the Poco F3 phone. I heard of cooling problems with the SD 888 which even occured on the Asus ROG Phone 5. I thought that the Poco F3 with SD 870 would be the better choice because of big money reasons and the cooling problems and therefore bad performance. Is it important how much RAM the Poco F3 has? I bought the one with 6 GB RAM because it was on sale. Would the 8 GB RAM Version be the better choice?

Again sorry for my english

[LG Fanatic]

6gigs is more than enough for dolphin.  In fact most emulators work well with even 2 or 3gigs of ram.

[Aggro_hamtaro]

I would like to know whether high res texture packs work with more ram.
Some texture packs such as the mario 4k texture pack prompt me a message "out of ram".
So yes, more ram is useful or you are planning to have the absolute best quality.