FEX

Five ways to run PC games on an Android handheld, and the one claim everybody repeats that is wrong. The Adreno 730 floor is a DroidDeck limit, not an ARM limit, and that changes the advice for anyone on an older chip.

All three Jak games have native PC ports now, and they run beautifully on a Steam Deck with no emulation at all. The Android videos showing it on ARM handhelds are doing something else entirely, and it is worth knowing what.

A project called Madeira stacks Wine, FEX and DXMT to run x86-64 Windows games on a non-jailbroken iPhone. Thumper and ULTRAKILL are playable. Cyberpunk is not, despite the headlines, and the JIT catch is worse than it sounds.

FEX, Box64, Proton, DXVK, DXMT, Rosetta, MoltenVK. Every guide to running PC games on ARM throws these names at you at once. Here is what each one does, why they stack, and why every extra layer costs you frames.