ARMSX2 brings a big boost for PS2 emulation on many Samsungs and Pixels

AetherSX2 and its NetherSX2 fork remain two of the best PS2 emulators on Android, but ARMSX2 is another promising project. It’s still early days for the initiative, but the developers have just released a big update for devices without Snapdragon processors.

The ARMSX2 team announced version 1.0.8 of the PS2 emulator via Discord, and the biggest addition might be integrated support for devices with Arm Mali GPUs.

“Mali support has been significantly improved in ARMSX2 1.0.8. Mali users no longer need to rely on a separate Mali-specific build to benefit from recent graphics fixes and compatibility improvements. These fixes are now included directly in the main ARMSX2 build,” the team explained.

More specifically, people with Mali-powered devices should see reduced graphics issues, improved behavior when using the OpenGL renderer, and more games with playable or stable performance. The team adds that you might have to set the Blending option to Maximum and turn off Show GPU on Stats to avoid seeing a black screen.

This is fantastic news if you’ve got a MediaTek-powered phone, as Mali GPUs are used in most of the firm’s Helio and Dimensity processors. This is also great news for many Pixel phones, as all Tensor chipsets prior to the Pixel 10‘s Tensor G5 used Mali graphics. Some budget Samsung phones use Mali graphics too.

This isn’t the only big change coming as part of this ARMSX2 update. The emulator now offers HostFS support, improved emulation of the PS2’s VU1 hardware, support for disc swapping, an FPS limit, and new internal resolution options (i.e., 0.25x, 0.5x, and 0.75x). The latter two options should help if you’re trying to emulate PS2 games on underpowered hardware.

It’s worth noting that ARMSX2 uses x86-to-Arm translation right now. This means it’s not as performant as PS2 emulators like NetherSX2, which are built from the ground up for Arm architecture. However, ARMSX2 Refresh is in the pipeline, and it indeed eschews translation in favor of a native release. So you might want to wait for this version if the current release doesn’t run well on your device.