Xiaomi recently announced the WinPlay feature that will be coming to its Android tablet line, which allows you to run Windows games and probably much more later, meaning projects like Winlator might get sidelined in the process.
It is reported that Xiaomi is working on a Windows support feature similar to projects like Winlator, which allows you to run Windows x86 and x64 software on Android. The WinPlay Engine is said to be specifically targeting games, and Xiaomi claims that the GPU performance loss will be only 2.9% and won’t require an Internet connection to work.
To add to the good news, Xiaomi says that the WinPlay Engine will support Steam, which is great news since many people rely on that platform to buy and play lots of games given its diverse and supported store. This also means that other game stores could be supported too, hence a bonus. However, this does not mean 100% compatibility and we expect some issues along the way.
Currently, the company is recruiting testers for its WinPlay engine and those who own the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro 12.4 in China can apply. The Pad 6S is quite a powerful tablet with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset and comes with 8/12/16GB of RAM, which could probably be able to support many games though there has not been any confirmation on how much RAM is required.
Given the recent and current generations of smartphones and tablets on the market, there has been a quite technological leap, which makes them capable devices to handle heavy applications when it comes to performance.
Xiaomi has not revealed which HyperOS devices will support WinPlay. For tablets, HyperOS 2 has “Workstation Mode”, which enables desktop-like multitasking with resizeable windows though this may not be the case for smartphones. However, we have to wait and see what Xiaomi has up its sleeves.
You can read more about WinPlay (and the Xiaomi HyperCore system that makes it possible) in this post by Zhang Guoquan, the Director of Xiaomi Mobile System Software Department. He says that Tomb Raider Game of the Year Edition runs at an average of 45fps with a total device power consumption of 8.3W.
Digital Chat Station has shared a minute-long demo video showing Need for Speed Most Wanted (Limited Edition) running on the tablet and working with an Xbox controller. Keyboards and mice are supported too, of course.
Source: GSMArena