Resident Evil 9 Is Running on Android Tablets! This Time It’s Seriously Impressive

As a long-time fan of the series with 120 hours under my belt, seeing Resident Evil 9: Requiem actually running on an Android tablet, my first reaction honestly wasn’t to question whether it was real. It was that same kind of excitement as the first time I saw a handheld cram in a console-level JRPG. Recently, well-known blogger @eXtas1stv released a hands-on test video showing how Capcom’s new title runs on an Android tablet. Judging from the footage, this isn’t the kind of “tech demo” that can only bring up a menu—it’s already running, fighting, and moving around in a fairly complete way.

The most important numbers are pretty straightforward: the game’s overall frame rate stays roughly between 30 and 40 FPS, with some scenes dropping to 20 FPS. Given the hardware limitations of mobile devices, this result has already exceeded a lot of people’s expectations, especially since the action transitions don’t feel obviously choppy. Overall, it looks more like a “portable console” at work than I had imagined. The original comment, “Seeing Resident Evil 9 running on an Android device is simply unbelievable,” really isn’t much of an exaggeration. The impact feels a bit like back in the day when you first saw a high-spec Japanese RPG fully packed into a handheld.

That said, limited by mobile hardware, the visuals don’t come without compromises. The current footage already shows flaws in some texture details, which is perfectly normal. After all, when trying to balance power consumption, heat, and performance, you can’t have high-resolution materials, stable frame rates, and long battery life all at once. Unfortunately, if you’re the kind of player who’s sensitive to texture edges and shadow quality, this kind of compromise can start to feel awkward over time—like compressing what should have been a finely polished character illustration into a mobile promotional image: the vibe is there, but the sharpness falls just short.

What’s worth noting is that the focus of this discussion is no longer just Resident Evil 9 itself, but whether “phones and tablets natively running AAA games will become the mainstream in the future.” The original article also raised this as a poll topic at the end, though it didn’t reveal the results. In my view, in the short term it’s more of a bonus for high-end device users than a mainstream solution that fully replaces PC or consoles. The reason is simple: stability, cooling, battery life, and touch-control adaptation—none of these issues has truly been solved.

In addition, if you already own Steam, a console, or a high-performance PC, then at this stage it still makes more sense to view an Android tablet running Resident Evil 9 as a technological breakthrough rather than your preferred way to play. Its biggest appeal is that it tells players one thing: the boundaries of how AAA games can be played are gradually being pushed outward. For players who like trying new things, that makes for a great talking point; for people who’ve been gaming for years, this may be the truly exciting signal.

The player community will most likely split into two camps next. One side will cheer that “if it runs, that’s a win,” while the other will keep nitpicking image quality and frame drops. From the perspective of a veteran player, I actually think both views are reasonable, because AAA games coming to mobile devices is a bit like a crystal-themed variation in the FF series: the core melody stays the same, but the arrangement is bound to change. It’s still too early to say whether this will become the mainstream in the future, but at the very least, Resident Evil 9’s performance on an Android tablet this time has already erased the words “completely impossible.”