Summary

• Winlator allows you to run Windows games on Android, but performance and game compatibility are key issues to consider.
• Setting up Winlator is straightforward, but getting games to run smoothly and efficiently can be time-consuming.
• Despite its limitations, Winlator is a promising emulator, with potential for future improvements.

Although modern smartphones pack plenty of firepower, emulating full-fledged x86 games has remained a tall order for even the best smartphones on the market. Sure, the Renegade Project technically allows you to install Windows 11 on a smartphone. But it's only compatible with a small pool of devices, requires an obscenely high amount of effort to set it up, and is prone to deal-breaking glitches. As such, it's not something your everyday user would install on their Android phone.

Meanwhile, the other popular emulator, QEMU, remains rife with performance issues, and is borderline unusable on something as powerful as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5. And I’ve spent enough time with Exagear to realize getting any 3D app to run on it is a futile effort. So, my expectations were quite low when I jumped headfirst into the Winlator rabbit-hole, though the emulator blew me away with its simple UI and rock-solid support for 2D games and older 3D titles.

Update: I've updated the article with new information after months of testing Winlator, Horizon-Emu, and Mobox with different smartphones and controllers.

What I like about Winlator

Simple UI and straightforward installation procedure

Despite my fondness for emulators, I'm not a big fan of how difficult they can be to set up. But compared to Mobox - and even Horizon-Emu, installing Winlator is a walk in the park, as all you have to do is install a single APK file on your smartphone, and you're good to go. Initializing containers is also a painless process, though you might need a bit of trial and error to figure out the best combination of settings for each game. While I have a series of complaints about the control options available in Winlator (which I'll get to in a bit), it doesn't require a lot of effort when setting up on-screen controls or physical gamepads.

It’s great for playing 2D games

For most of my tests, I used my Poco F5, a mid-range phone with a Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 processor. It’s not the best processor that you can use with Winlator, but it ran most of the 2D games I threw at it with ease. I started with the least hardware-intensive games I own: Slay The Princess and Hollow Knight, and both games consistently ran at over 30FPS at 1280x720 resolution. To up the ante, I installed Signalis and Ori and the Blind Forest on my Winlator container, and after tweaking a handful of settings, I managed to get them up and running at playable frame rates after dropping the resolution to 800x600. Other 2D titles, such as Darkest Dungeon, Axiom Verge, and World of Horror needed similar sacrifices on the resolution front, on top of requiring changes to the DX Wrapper and Box86/64 settings.

Old 3D games work well for the most part

Once I’d gone through my repertoire of 2D games, it was time to raise the bar further by testing my favorite 3D titles. I kicked things off with the original Deus Ex, and my Poco F5 didn’t encounter any issues running the old-school game at playable frame rates. Next, I tried F.E.A.R. and Dead Space (2008), and to my surprise, both games ran at nearly 60FPS with medium settings at 960x544 resolution. Fallout 3, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night produced similar results, though I had to create separate shortcuts with their own set of tweaks to run the games properly.

Feeling emboldened by my successes so far, I tried to give the original Crysis a spin, and the result was interesting, to say the least. At 800x600 resolution, I was able to get the game to boot by switching the Box86 and Box64 Presets to Stability modes. Next, I lowered all settings to Low, and after disabling Joyos on my Poco F5’s HyperOS, I managed to get the game running at close to 30FPS. Well, on paper, the game runs at playable frame rates, but there are a ton of performance issues that make it difficult to enjoy blasting through enemies with the Nanosuit.

What I don’t like about Winlator

Performance issues, with just as many crashes

Continuing from my previous statement, while it’s possible to "play" Crysis on a smartphone on Winlator, only the devices with the beefiest CPUs can run the game without performance issues. On my Poco F5, the water textures and certain lighting sources were glitched, and the frame rate would constantly drop under 20FPS every time a group of enemies showed up.

Update: Although the performance on version 7.1 is better than what it used to back when I wrote this portion of the article, Crysis still runs well under constant 30FPS even after loweing the resolution and settings.

Unfortunately, Crysis isn’t the only game riddled with these issues. The older Assassin’s Creed games run at terrible frame rates, while certain games like Just Cause 2, Sunless Skies, and Disco Elysium would crash moments after I launch them.

What’s more, Winlator, like other emulators, runs much better on a Snapdragon processor than its Dimensity and Exynos counterparts. So, if you’re planning to run some of the more demanding titles, you’ll need something as powerful as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. And yes, I deliberately mentioned SD 8 Gen 2 instead of Gen 3, because the latest version of Winlator doesn’t support the flagship Snapdragon mobile chip. Having tested the app on other devices like the Poco M6 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy M34 5G, I can confirm that your average non-Snapdragon CPU - and even a budget SD chip - won't be good enough to provide a decent experience in 3D titles.

Limited game library and long load times

I mentioned earlier that you can only run games that don’t have any DRM protection on Winlator. While there may be some exploit out there that makes it possible to run Steam on Winlator, I’d advise against doing so if you value your sanity. Unlike Mobox, which lets you run Steam after a couple of workarounds, GOG is the only way to legally acquire game files for Winlator. But since its library isn’t as extensive as Steam’s, you won’t be able to play lightweight games like the older Final Fantasy and Tales of titles, even though they should run well on the emulator.

And then there are the exorbitantly long load times when installing or launching games. For instance, games with plenty of assets, such as Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana and Dragon Age: Origins, took hours to install. Likewise, certain titles, like Crysis, Hollow Knight, and even Slay the Princess, take a while to boot after you launch them from their containers.

Controls need some fine-tuning

I’ll give credit to Winlator where it’s due: the app has a built-in controller and an RTS keyboard template that you can customize to your liking. Additionally, Winlator detects external keyboards, mice, and controllers, allowing you to play Windows games using gamepads and good ol’ KB+M controls. But depending on the game, the mouse sensitivity can range from alright to completely bonkers. Having tested both the virtual controller and four physical USB mice, I had to spend some time getting used to the mouse sensitivity on the emulator.

As for external keyboards, Winlator just doesn’t register the Esc and Enter keys. An easy workaround involves installing the key remapper application on your current container and binding the inputs to their respective keys. Fair warning though, you may need an extra macro key for Esc, as Winlator failed to accept the Escape key on all three of my keyboards as valid input. I didn't have any issues with this when I used my Redragon K585, as the one-handed keyboard has plenty of extra keys. But finding a suitable replacement key for Esc was a real pain on my primary mechanical keyboard.

Another pet-peeve of mine was that I had to remap my external gamepads to keyboard and mouse buttons on more than one occasion. But as someone who frequently uses both the GameSir G8+ and X4 Aileron, they work pretty well with the emulator, and I dare say that Winlator is far better than its closest rivals when it comes to controls. That's because Horizon-Emu and Mobox rely on InputBridge for the controls, which is a lot more complex to calibrate than the built-in provisions on Winlator.

Winlator: A phenomenal concept that’s still in its early stages

Winlator is by no means the be-all and end-all Windows emulator for Android devices, and with all the issues and bugs present in the app, it needs a lot of optimization and compatibility updates before it can run well on non-Snapdragon devices. With that said, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed by the emulator.

Sure, it can’t run most 3D titles – or even certain 2D titles – at 1080p 60FPS on even the most powerful Android phones. But just being able to run Windows games on your smartphone without rooting the device or spending hours installing random drivers is nothing short of amazing. There are plenty of glaring issues with it, but for an experimental emulator that’s still in its early stages of development, it’s definitely worth checking out. We've already seen plenty of performance updates since I last wrote this article. With version 8 offering better frame rates than ever, I wouldn’t be surprised if Winlator could run modern PC games by 2025.