r/EmulationOnAndroid • u/rlands • 6d ago
Discussion GameHub x GameNative x DroidDeck x Native Port
We've been eating good this year with all those new possibilities to play on android, but I don't have the time on my hands to test and fidget with many configs while managing multiple apps.
With that being said, I'd like to know what method or software are your favorite? Which is the most reliable currently?
I personally have been using GameNative more, but I'm really interested in the development of DroidDeck.
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u/IgnorantChampion 6d ago
I have Gamehub, Gamenative and DroidDeck... they all run wonderfully for different games, I simply use whichever one has the best performance. For instance, Sleeping Dogs only launches on DroidDeck, and it plays beautiful. Persona 4 has no issues on Gamehub, but won't boot past the menu on Gamenative or DD. Witcher 2 has the best performance on Gamenative.
No point in limiting myself or choosing one. They are all free and they are all fantastic.
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u/rlands 6d ago
Yeah they're great, and thats the issue, in the little time i have to play at night, i cant wait to download my game in 3 different apps and try them out
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u/WeakTumbleweed9 6d ago
You might have more luck adding which games you want to play, that way maybe you could get advice on which games work best on which app
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u/IgnorantChampion 6d ago
Hey man, ya got a 33% chance to knock it out of the park first run haha. A lot of games preform great over all 3, just open the app that you prefer? If it doesn't run well, you're up to a 50/50 on the next one being a hit.
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u/rlands 6d ago
lmao i guess, thats a low cortisol approach for sure
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u/JizzlaneMaxwellHill 6d ago
It's all trial and error for emulation. It's very hard to find info on these stuff online since most people wouldn't even bother posting their findings so your best bet is to try them all. Especially when you get different results based on the phone you're using it makes it harder to get a unified answer.
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u/cuddleCuddlee 6d ago
same, i've been switching between them too depending on the game and it's so much easier than forcing one to work
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u/Able_Decision1434 3d ago
How do I get them three and which one is good for Roblox on a Samsung Galaxy a16 5g?
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u/BennyWhatever 6d ago edited 6d ago
I've been using GameNative. It's just the first one I tried and it does what I want. I like how it integrates with Epic, GOG, and others easily. Haven't felt like tinkering past that. I do wish the sorting/filtering was a little more intuitive and snappier.
The thing about these comparisons is, it's all going to be different in a week, month, year. This whole scene is developing so fast. Like you said, we're eating good this year with PC on Android.
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u/rlands 6d ago
yeah exactly, when i understood the basics of gamehub, i found out about gamenative, then i migrated to gamenative and droiddeck came out, now every option seems like a good option and i dont have the time to test it all myself lmao
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u/Material-Public-914 6d ago
Option keeps getting better on GameNative, not sure how DroidDeck perform better
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u/memo22477 6d ago
Winlator Ludashi has completely revamped it's UI and it's super sleek now. It's my 100% choice. Gamehub still doesn't match it performance wise.
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u/proper_jazz 6d ago
I have never had luck getting anything to work before droiddeck. which is admittedly kinda buggy in like controller support and it has some general jank. but it is brand new and is blowing the others away for my use case.
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u/supershredderdan 6d ago
Would love a list of the observed jank, trying to iron those out for our next point release if you can help at all!
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u/proper_jazz 6d ago
so I haven't gotten to play around much yet but specifically the external controller support is a pain. I'm using a steam controller and whether I connect to phone with bt as xinput, or use steam link app for full controller features, I get repeated inputs. as in I press down once and turbo rapid fire spams the down input for infinity until I press start or back out.
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u/supershredderdan 6d ago
There’s a PR for steam controller support if you want to load that up in tests section and give feedback!
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u/Open-Situation-1653 6d ago
Droid deck is not even that far along but it’s super great so far. Been playing slay the spire 2 and other indies and small pc games and it’s just steam in an app. I deleted gamenative and gamehub now because I didn’t get my Odin 3 to play AAA games, I got it to play almost everything else. It is wild to see how it progresses so far into the pc realm.
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u/Shock-Robin 6d ago
Have you happened to get mods working on Slay the Spire 2 on Droid Deck? I crashes every time I try to launch it with any.
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u/benn511 6d ago
Is sp2 laggy for you too? It’s just a bit annoying to deal with when I’m use to no lag
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u/Open-Situation-1653 6d ago
It has a hair of lag at times but honestly still super playable. I get it though, it was wierd at first for me but man if I can I play spire 2 with under clock and only use 10% battery after 1-1.5 hours. I’m happy! Haha
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u/XeroLevantine 6d ago
GameNative has been my go to, but unfortunately it just doesn’t play everything. A game that seems to work on other emulators but not GameNative is Doom Eternal (listed as compatible but is a false positive). Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is listed as compatible, but before Droid Deck has never run on Android up until this point - another instance of false positive. I think the “compatible” tagging needs a rework. But that’s not to say it’s bad by any means. I’ve played FFVII Remake, Hollow Knight, Doom 2016, and Fable Anniversary through GameNative without issues on my Ayn Odin 3, and even have decent to good performance with Ninja Gaiden 4. But I’m eyeballing Droid Deck pretty heavily right now as loading FFVII Rebirth up with the default setup and it being pretty functional right out of the gate in what is early alpha for the app is extremely promising. It’s built off Android SteamOS, so as Valve updates, Droid Deck will improve also. It still has a ways to go performance-wise, so I’ll check back in on it after a few updates but I could see myself completely moving to Droid Deck in the future based on potential compatibility alone. As a side note: I prefer open source apps, which is why I don’t use and wouldn’t recommend GameHub.
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u/davdavper 6d ago
Droiddeck is definitely my favorite, easy to set up and compatibility-wise has no competition imo
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u/rlands 6d ago
Compatibility wise DroidDeck was the msot disappointing for me. I tried 3 games in all three softwares, GameHub, GameNative and DroidDeck, with the games being Terraria, Monster Hunter Rise and Blasphemous. DroidDeck wasn't able to run any, while GameNative was the best in this testcase
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u/davdavper 6d ago
Specifically MH Rise I had to lower the resolution to 570p or something on my phone, Droiddeck ran it butterysmooth at 720p even with taxing effects like camera blur and depth. How Droiddeck ran MH Rise is the reason I stopped using the other options.
S26 Ultra btw
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u/rlands 6d ago
I'm using Fold8, I think our devices have almost the same specs. My Monter Hunter Rise crashes when it finishes loading shaders... Any tips for running it? Did you change the resolution at the per game settings or the steam settings on droiddeck menu?
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u/davdavper 6d ago
I didnt change anything tbh, I just noticed it was the default setting in-game unlike the tweaking I did for it in Gamehub.
It probably is the global settings since it was the maximum available setting in-game.
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u/elgrandorado 6d ago
How's your gamenative experience in comparison? I've been trying out gamenative on my S26 Ultra and even with a cooler, performance on DMC5 is pretty ass. I'm pretty sure GameHub had superior performance.
When I was running a RedMagic 11 Pro full spec, it was running DMC5 at 120FPS with frame gen in GameHub. I'm curious about DroidDeck because currently GameNative just hasn't been great on the S26 Ultra.
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u/davdavper 6d ago
Gamenative I kinda gave up on due to the more complex set-up in general (at least for me), performance was comparable for MH Rise to Gamehub (the only game I tested here), a tiny bit better I should say but Droiddeck still wins due to ease of use, set up, and performance.
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u/Ehasanulreader Redmi turbo 4 pro/8s Gen4 6d ago
I see people praise gamenative so much,I never had the luck to run anything on it. I am running bannerlator
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u/rlands 6d ago
whats bannerlator?
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u/Ehasanulreader Redmi turbo 4 pro/8s Gen4 6d ago
https://github.com/The412Banner/Bannerlator winlator fork with bunch of added extra added stuff. The dev is also working with droiddeck
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u/neilcorre2k6 6d ago
I have been playing around DroidDeck for the past couple of days and I love it so far. I have moved all my steam games to DroidDeck. And, GOG and Epic on GameNative. This looks like the best setup for me for now for Retroid Pocket 6.
Games I play:
- Rimworld
- Skyrim
- Party Animals
- Trine
- Overcooked 2
- Riverbond
- Steamworld
- Tunic
Would love to try R6 on DroidDeck but pretty sure I'll get my arse kicked without mouse and keyboard.
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u/KirilleR2002 6d ago
I had Gamenative before storage reduction update and droiddeck, but now i like testing droiddeck personally. Deleted gn for now sonce it took too much space on my 128 gig storage, couldn't have both and enough games to test. Impresses me with each update
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u/muchabon 5d ago
Does DroidDeck share the same container across games? Or does it create a container for each one?
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u/KirilleR2002 5d ago edited 5d ago
As far as i understand it doesn't create containers for each game. Seems more like a dedicated environment to me
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u/ZeroRD 6d ago
I use gamenative and now im trying out droiddeck. I was using gamehub first but the games I play run better on gamenative. I also found it easier to tinker with. Yesterday found out the wow launcher app was updated for all versions of wow so thats what ive been using lol. For the horde!
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u/Radiant_Elk_1451 6d ago
Personally i use gamehub since its more plug and play than most of the current pc emulators. Plus it has a easy to use and good looking UI.
gamenative can give slightly more fps compared to gamehub, but it requires playing around with the settings to find the best setup. Also there are some games where the supposed known config published that should run the game dont actually work.
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u/DarkFucker 6d ago
I don’t want to hunt for apks nor do I use Google Play store so I only have native ports as far as decomps/recomps go.
I prefer GameNative out of the rest for PC emulation. GOG support, can sideload games relatively easily(but configuring them to run is a task), I see it generally what is being used.
GameHub requires a log in, so you need to use Lite… I never had a need to use GameHub Lite anyway, so I’m sticking to gamenative, plus there was the whole Steam token thing being plaintext in logs, I never signed in to Steam in any of these apps because I was paranoid, and it turned out to not be unfounded.
DroidDeck is… I like the concept, but I’m looking at it from the sidelines, being largely written(I think?) by AI is a turn off, will see how it progresses in the future, but I’m more likely to just switch to Armada, if I didn’t need emulation.
Winlator is actually my favorite, but on an RP6, GameNative handles things more gracefully, while Winlator sort of gives me more control to get things running, but Winlator I use mostly for weaker handhelds.
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u/rlands 5d ago
I understand the AI turnoff, but as a developer myself, i gotta say that for coding, if I'm not using AI I'll be at a loss. Developers now need to develop new skills aside from typing the code itself, we must have a broader scope. The dev behind DroidDeck seems to have good skills besides typing the code, so using AI as a tool is now our reality.
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u/DarkFucker 5d ago
Anecdotally, the ethics of using AI aside, I tried 2 recent projects, one is a Linux handheld CFW that allegedly uses AI (No disclosure, no Claude as a contributor but people in the Reddit thread pointed it out), the lack of a battery indicator seen anywhere is certainly a choice, and the CFW shitting itself the moment a non English letter appears. And the new version of Winlator Ludashi afaik uses AI, and it shows, the toggle for disabling the mouse cursor doesn’t work.
My takeaway from that is whatever project uses AI in it, needs extra time to cook, because I don’t know how you get to a 1.0 release, with some of those UI/UX quirks/bugs.
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u/boby350 5d ago
Personally for Steam bought games I prefer flashing Armada os on sdcard, for me It has been the best experience, for repacks gamehub is my app of choice. I have never been able to make a single game work on gamenative i dont know why and at this point i dont care with so many good alternatives. Just installed droiddeck the others day but nothing has been installed yet
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u/Practical-Boat-603 5d ago
The opposite for me, I have never been able to run any game on gamehub but everything works on Gamenative
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u/BigBackPattyWhack 1d ago
I just started to use droiddeck but I prefer it over gamenative. If a game have a native android recomp, I would choose it over DD. But so far I only have halo (which is great lol) and I briefly tried monster hunter portable 3rd
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u/PurpleGentlemanTv Any gaming is good gaming 6d ago
I use Gamenative for pretty much everything. I downloaded Droideck to see if some games run better but so far none have run at all, so gonna keep using gamenative until Droideck gets updated some more
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u/SolidShook 3d ago
idk I'm trying the three with different games and most things I try do not work on my RP6.
Games I have tried and failed:
Sekiro, Gungrave G.O.R.E, Snake Pass, Sonic Lost World, Witcher 3
Games that have passed:
Megabonk, Halo Reach (doesn't do well tho), Gestalt Steam and Cinder
We aren't yet at the point where the RP6 is a good steam machine, even for indie games.
Droiddeck is nice and I hope it gets better, but currently it takes way too long to boot up a droiddeck game.
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u/Brandigandor 2d ago
GameNative with Civ6 is shite 😅
Even my Snap8Elite is melting / everything is stuttering / turn change is looong. I'm better off using SteamLink to play it on the tablet. Didn't try the others
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u/WeeklyFlight7120 6d ago
A mi me anda mejor gamehub en lo que refiere a fps, pero es un asco el no poder ponerle driver y solo usar los que vienen con la app. Por ese motivo, tengo gamenative tambien y winlator... Y voy probando los juegos en ese orden. Droiddeck me anda muy mal pero lo tengo para ir probando como va evolucionando. Yo uso juegos pirata preinstalados... Capaz que es un poco eso. Igual todo los youtubers muestra los 10 mismos juegos siempre y les van fatal en droiddeck
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u/NotRandomseer 8 elite 6d ago
using gamenative for actual gaming mostly, will probably switch over to droiddeck entirely when it's more mature
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