ARMSX2 Refresh brings big news for PS2 emulation on older Pixels

ARMSX2 Update was released about two weeks ago, and the PS2 emulator has seen a steady stream of updates since then. A recent update also brings good news if you have a device with Arm’s Mali graphics.

ARMSX2 Refresh version 2.3.5 was released on GitHub yesterday, and fixes a major issue in Mali GPUs. More specifically, the emulator would crash on Mali-powered devices when you tried to launch a game with the Vulkan renderer enabled.

“This should improve performance for Mali users!” reads an excerpt from the changelog.

I tried an older version of ARMSX2 Refresh on the Pixel 9 Pro XL and found that the app crashed when you selected the Vulkan renderer and tried to start a game. However, these same games started fine with the latest update.

This fix is ​​great news if you have a MediaTek-powered device or an older Pixel phone. Vulkan is often (but not always) the preferred graphics renderer when running more demanding emulators on non-Snapdragon devices. In fact, it generally increases the speed of Snapdragon-powered devices as well.

This isn’t the only notable ARMSX2 Refresh update in recent days. Version 2.3.2 of the app was released a few days ago and offers the ability to choose subnative internal resolution options. That means you can run games at 0.25x, 0.5x, or 0.75x the original output resolution. This is ideal for budget devices, as the ability to run games below the native resolution should improve performance.

All of these updates apply to ARMSX2 Refresh on GitHub instead of the standard version of ARMSX2 on the Play Store. The Play Store version uses code translation (x86 to Arm), which inherently has a performance penalty compared to the native Refresh app.