Future Galaxy flagships could turn into true PC gaming handhelds

Smartphones have become increasingly powerful these days, but all that raw performance is rarely utilized. Outside of a few mobile games, the processing power of flagship smartphone chips often goes to waste. However, future flagship Galaxy phones with Qualcomm chips may soon double as true PC gaming handhelds.

Currently, running Windows PC games on Android devices through emulators requires you to install unofficial GPU drivers, like Turnip, to achieve acceptable performance. But Qualcomm is reportedly planning to update its official GPU drivers for flagship Snapdragon chips to natively improve support for PC game emulation on Android.

Popular Chinese tech YouTuber Geekerwan revealed that Qualcomm is considering adding proper DirectX 12 support to its Snapdragon chips, which will make emulating PC games on Android phones significantly easier.

The YouTuber tested this capability on a refernce device using the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip and successfully ran demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong in DirectX 12 mode and achieved an average frame rate of over 30fps.

It remains unclear if Qualcomm will limit these driver updates to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 series or bring them to older high-end chips. Nevertheless, if you have ever wanted to fully unleash the power inside high-end Galaxy phones with Snapdragon chips, playing PC games could soon be the way to do it.

The Galaxy S27 Pro and the Galaxy S27 Ultra are expected to feature a higher-clocked variant of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip, paired with 12GB or 16GB of RAM depending on the model. That hardware combination should provide more than enough headroom to run Windows PC games via emulation.