Your Phone MAY NOT Handle Yuzu Emulator on Android

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And you thought Genshin Impact is a torture device for your phone.

The title may sound clickbait, so let’s answer it right away. To run Yuzu Emulator for Android, you need a phone with the following specs:

  • Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 (Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 recommended)
  • 128GB ROM (256GB ROM recommended)
  • 8GB RAM (12GB RAM recommended)
  • Android 11 or newer

Yuzu has also noted that the phones must have an Adreno GPU. Currently, the emulator WILL NOT WORK on any MediaTek, Exynos, or Kirin chipsets because they have “worse-than-Adreno” GPU drivers. So even if you have a phone that uses a MediaTek Dimensity 9000, the emulator will not work and may crash when attempting to run it.

Yuzu is a popular Nintendo Switch emulator first available on PCs. It is also as demanding on a PC as it is on a phone because of the games that the Switch offers. For instance, the Android version of Yuzu mentions that to run Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a phone must have 12GB RAM at best to prevent the app from crashing. And here you thought that Genshin Impact tortures your phone.

The Emulator is currently on a beta release so some things are not stable yet. However, by their own tests, it seems that major titles like Super Mario 3D World and Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword works just fine on the Qualcomm versions of the Samsung Galaxy S23 and Galaxy S20 FE. There is also a very small probability that the emulator will run on Exynos 2200 thanks to the AMD RDNA architecture that was integrated.

The team behind XDA Developers also ran their own tests and concluded that Animal Crossing: New Horizons experienced various technical glitches.

Yuzu’s team also found out that the ZTE Nubia RedMagic 8 Pro was able to maintain its high clock speed and low temperature while running the emulator. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S23 is feeling tortured as its temperature rose to 90ºC which may not damage the device significantly, but also, the phone has to throttle itself to keep it from becoming the next Galaxy Note 7, and thus lower clock speeds.

You could read more of their tests, set-up guides, and limitations on Yuzu’s website.

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