New PlayStation 2 emulator for Android promises better PS2 emulation than AetherSX2

Since AetherSX2 was abandoned, there hasn't been any significant progress in terms of PlayStation 2 emulation on Android. Of course, the PS2 emulator did see some updates from other developers, which brought new features and tweaks, but the emulation performance hasn't seen much of an upgrade since the original developer abandoned the project.

However, it seems that PS2 emulation on Android will finally see a meaningful upgrade. A new PlayStation 2 emulator named ARMSX2 is slowly progressing towards its stable version. The team behind the project has already released test builds, and while it's in a very early state, the reworked Open GL renderer seems promising.

This reworked Open GL renderer on the test build 0.5.4 is promising up to 40% improvement in terms of performance when compared to the regular renderer. The developers have also mentioned that in an upcoming build, there will be an easy migration process to switch from NetherSX2, which is a fork of AetherSX2.

At the moment, however, it might not be a good idea to switch to ARMSX2 fully, as the PS2 emulator is still using x86 to ARM64 translation. That, combined with the fact that it's in an early stage, means that the performance may be worse than NetherSX2 or AetherSX2.

The good part is that the development is progressing at a good pace, and at this rate, version 1.0 may not take long time to be released. Speaking of which, the current test builds are only available on Discord, but the full version, when it is released, will be available on GitHub.