Gamer Gets The Witcher 3 ‘Fully Playable’ on a Phone

Highlights

• The Witcher 3 Switch port is reportedly “fully playable” on some contemporary flagship smartphones.
• One fan recently got the game to run using both Suyu and Sudachi emulators, claiming that the result was a “fully playable” experience.

One mobile gaming enthusiast has recently managed to get The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt running on a smartphone. They did so by emulating the Switch version of The Witcher 3, with the end result of their efforts being described as a “fully playable” experience.

While cutting-edge console emulation is normally at least several generations behind the very latest consoles, the Switch is a major outlier in this respect. Due to Nintendo’s decision to equip it with the Nvidia-made Tegra X1, which was considered a fairly standard mid-range mobile system-on-chip in 2017, Switch emulation didn’t have to start from scratch. The niche has instead immediately benefited from the already high level of understanding of Nvidia’s mobile architecture at the time. While emulation itself is legal, Nintendo is still quite diligent about cracking down on emulators suspected of facilitating piracy, though that has done little to stop Switch emulation from progressing at a steady pace.

The Witcher 3 Pictured Running on the OnePlus 11

Yet another testament to that trend now comes in the form of a report from Reddit user ROGUE-Pamu_Love, who has recently been successful in getting the Switch version of The Witcher 3 to run on a smartphone. Specifically, the fan used the 16GB RAM variant of the OnePlus 11, a 2023 flagship powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. Among other advantages, the OnePlus 11 chipset is significantly more energy-efficient than the Switch SoC, on top of being roughly 3.5 times more powerful, going by the raw number of floating point operations per second.

While using teraFLOPS to compare performance across different chip architectures is a deeply flawed methodology, the OnePlus 11 SoC is apparently superior enough to emulate The Witcher 3, which the user reported was “fully playable” in both Suyu and Sudachi Switch Android emulators. Granted, not everyone might agree with their definition of “playable,” as the screenshots they shared appear to show the game running at half its native Switch resolution, which was already fairly low and blurry to begin with. Nevertheless, the player reports that the latest versions of Suyu and Sudachi run The Witcher 3 without crashes and at a stable frame rate.

Emulation aside, The Witcher series has so far been treated to seven mobile spin-offs, the first of which was released in 2014. And while most of those games have been shut down as of early 2024, even more might be coming in the foreseeable future, with CDPR confirming it’s currently actively pursuing new mobile gaming opportunities.