Borderlands 2 is now accessible on current Android mobiles. No longer do you need to be running windows and emulating a virtual environment.
Community developers bypass emulation layers to run the shooter natively on ARM
This is significant because now you can enjoy a rather complicated old school PC shooter on your mobile device, without having to worry about all of the 'lag' that comes with translating an experience like this to a mobile platform. If you have a top tier device this means that you can play a deep, content filled RPG right on your phone.
The port leverages the existing Nvidia Shield build for its source code and technical structure. What has been done is that community developers took that and ported it to run natively on ARM architecture. This means that you aren't trying to translate what's happening through Wine or other compatibility layers, instead it's running on your ARM based phone's CPU directly.
When the initial ports first dropped, it had some graphic issues. The dev team immediately needed to jump in and address those. The lead dev of the project ended up fixing those visual bugs and improved stability and the code in general. So now you have a pretty solid build with graphics that are on par with what you saw in the original game on a mobile screen.
As far as performance goes, devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite in them appear to be running between 80-120FPS. So, it looks like you can easily run this game with great performance on modern mobile hardware without a ton of throttling. That's pretty impressive how well this game can run on current generation mobile silicon.
Note that this is still very much a community driven port and not something 'officially' released by either Gearbox or 2K. Basically there are folks that love this kind of stuff that are able to bridge the PC and android gap, but it's not an official kind of thing. So, if you want to use this port expect it to be 'unofficial' and rely on the community for ongoing support.
Source: IXBT




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