Winlator 8.0 Update is Available - Adds Support for Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and More [Android News Byte]

Version 8 of Winlator is now available and it comes with a lot of much needed improvements!

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Mentioned Links
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Winlator GitHub - https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator
Winlator v8 APK - https://dlupload.com/filedetail/13520...


Video Description
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Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Android News Byte.
Today, I wanted to highlight a major update to the popular Windows emulator, Winlator.

I've shown off this emulator on the channel in the past, so if you're a fan of playing classic PC games on your smartphone, then definitely give it a try.

The developer has just released version 8 of the application and with it comes a lot of new changes that have been highly anticipated.

First off, I wanted to highlight the added support for Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipsets. We previously had to use a modded version of Winlator on devices with this chip. . .but that is no longer required. I won't say there is a need to drop those modded versions, since they still add some nice optimizations in some cases. But they are no longer required for this chipset.

The changelog lists a new and improved user interface, there's now a file manager for the container, and added screen effects like color adjustment, fxaa, and crt shaders.

There's a new option to select your preferred input API (for directinput or xinput) which is useful in games like dragon's dogma, street fighter 4, and others
there's a new option to disable mouse input, so that you can use a virtual gamepad
and an option to move the cursor to the touchpoint, rather than requiring you to swipe the mouse around on the screen.

something that will be really nice for point and click adventure games.

The developer says this update makes some improvements to input controls
improvements to the alsa audio driver
improvements to directinput as well as drives on the container

and the update to winlator version 8 also updates dxvk to version 2.4, it updates box64 to version 0.3.0, and it updates the mesa turnip driver to version 24.2.0

there have been some specific workarounds added to the emulator that help it play games like starbound, venetica, fate, medal of honor allied assault, return to castle wolfenstein, final fantasy 12, dues ex mankind divided, and many more.

so if you had trouble running a popular PC game on the previous version of winlator then it's definitely worth trying again on this latest update

this is especially true if you had performance issues on some of those games. since the last thing in this changelog mentions there have been performance improvements. so if you noticed that a game was just under the threshold of being playable, then updating to version 8 may be the solution

with that said, I am seeing a lot of reports mentioning that this update tanked the performance of some games they were playing.
games that had been running perfectly fine on version 7

for example, I see a comment talking about FPS on the game unreal tournament dropping from 30 to 3 after this update was installed
gothic 2 was another game I saw mentioned in the reddit thread where they claim performance dropped to 5 frames per second when playing it on this update

I can't say for sure if this is universal for everyone, or if this is just happening to people who have updated to the latest version. . .or if it's just happening with specific hardware.

just be sure to make a backup of your save games just in case you need to roll back to a previous version

there's been a lot of speculation about the future of winlator with the modded versions performing so much better than the main branch has been lately. and with the developer leaving the discord server recently, that's only helped to fuel that speculation

so if you're wanting to stay up to date on the latest changes, it may be best to follow them on their youtube channel

I'll also have the APK file mirrored on a different hosting service just in case this release gets pulled or anything. there will always be a direct download to that APK file there as well




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