Tips and tricks for a better experience

 Being an advanced PS2 emulator, AetherSX2 can be a major challenge for smartphones. It doesn’t help that hundreds of phone models and dozens of processors are out there. Fortunately, the developer includes several features and offers plenty of tips.

Try changing the graphics renderer from OpenGL to Vulkan, for one. The Vulkan API generally delivers a fast experience but might not deliver the best experience for all games.

This leads to our next tip. In case you didn’t know, you can tap and hold on a game listing to adjust settings only for that title. This is handy if you’ve got one game that requires plenty of tweaks, while the rest of your library works just fine with minimal changes.

The developer also recommends that those with slower phones try underclocking the emulated console’s CPU. This can be accomplished by visiting the Three-line Menu button > App Settings > System, then choosing the EE Cycle Rate (Underclocking) and EE Cycle Skip (Underclocking option) fields. The EE Cycle Rate should be changed to a negative number, while the Cycle Skip should be set at a positive number.

Another handy tip from the horse’s mouth is to enable the Multi-Threaded VU1 option (found in the Three-line menu button > App Settings > System). This can also bring a significant speed boost but requires at least three big CPU cores. Enabling this on a phone with only two big cores could result in slower speeds.

Three other settings worth toggling for better performance include the GPU Palette Conversion, Preload Textures, and Disable Hardware Readbacks options.

One way to potentially get better performance that has nothing to do with the app is to switch from your phone’s default power profile to a performance mode (usually available in battery settings). This increases performance at the expense of battery life and temperature. Just keep in mind that higher temperatures can also lead to faster throttling. This could make the default power mode better for longer play sessions.

AetherSX2 also supports resolution upscaling, from 1x (the original resolution of the game) all the way to 8x. This doesn’t work well with every game. Still, it’s worth experimenting with this option if your preferred game has some headroom for a higher resolution.

The game does support save states, but updates tend to wipe them. Save to the virtual memory card in every game if you don’t want to start from scratch after every update.