We installed Genshin Impact on the slowest Android 10 tablet we could find just to see what would happen. It wasn't pretty

Genshin Impact is perhaps the hottest new mobile game right now having already grossed over $100 million during its first week of availability. Unlike most other mobile games, the title is a sprawling open world with long draw distances in the same vein as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild which naturally makes it one of the most demanding games on any mobile device.

We recently tried running the game on one of the cheapest Android tablets available with the slow PowerVR GE8322 GPU just to see what would happen and the results weren't pretty. As shown by the screenshots below, faces on characters would fail to load and the water would glow an eerie green for no apparent reason. Texture pop-ins, sub 30 frame rates, delayed inputs, and sudden pauses when rotating the camera all contribute to an unplayable game. Reducing all graphical settings to minimum would fix the character facial issues, but all other aforementioned problems would remain.

The best way to play Genshin Impact is indubitably on PC where controls are easier and frame rates are much more stable even on a sub-GeForce 1060 GPU. Users who insist on playing on smartphones or tablets instead are going to want the latest beefy hardware to avoid the visual bugs that might occur on weaker hardware.