Xiaomi's new WinPlay system will let you play Windows games on its Android tablets

You may have heard of or even tried projects like Winlator, which let you run Windows x86 and x64 software on Android. Interestingly, Xiaomi has revealed that it is working on Windows support for its Android devices too.

The WinPlay Engine is specifically targeting games, which are typically the most demanding of Windows software. Xiaomi says that GPU performance loss is only 2.9%. This is a fully on-device solution and doesn’t require an Internet connection to work.

Xiaomi is testing running Windows games on its Android tablets

According to Xiaomi, WinPlay supports Steam, which is great news – it’s one of the biggest repositories of PC games out there. And if Steam is supported, other storefronts should be possible too. Note that this doesn’t mean 100% compatibility, but some games have compatibility issues even on Windows PCs.

The company is recruiting testers for WinPlay – owners of the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro 12.4 in China can apply. This slate is pretty powerful with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset and comes with 8/12/16GB of RAM (there’s no word on how much RAM is required and it certainly varies from game to game).

You can read more about WinPlay (and the Xiaomi HyperCore system that makes it possible) in this post by Zhang Guoquan, the Director of Xiaomi Mobile System Software Department. He says that Tomb Raider Game of the Year Edition runs at an average of 45fps with a total device power consumption of 8.3W.

Xiaomi's WinPlay in action

Of course, smartphones are a couple of generations ahead, so they have even more performance on tap – that said, Xiaomi has not revealed which HyperOS devices will support WinPlay. For tablets, HyperOS 2 has “Workstation Mode”, which enables desktop-like multitasking with resizable windows. Phones don’t have an equivalent feature, but we may be getting ahead of ourselves – let’s see how the WinPlay tests on the Pad 6S go first.

Digital Chat Station has shared a minute-long demo video showing Need for Speed Most Wanted (Limited Edition) running on the tablet and working with an Xbox controller. Keyboards and mice are supported too, of course.

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