Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 can run Grand Theft Auto and God of War, at decent frame rates, too

File this one under improbable jaw-loosening feats, as a Redditor manages to get these games running smoothly via a PSP emulator on the smartwatch.

Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 can run Grand Theft Auto and God of War, at decent frame rates, too
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Tech Reporter
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TL;DR: A Reddit user successfully ran Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, God of War, and other games, on a Galaxy Watch 5 using a PSP emulator and a Bluetooth gamepad. The games run smoothly, although God of War hit some frame rate drops at times. The way it works is complicated and involves side-loading APKs, not to mention there's a minefield of copyright issues here.

Never mind Doom, can Grand Theft Auto run on a smartwatch? Most certainly, as an intrepid denizen of Reddit has just proved.

This feat was pulled off with a Galaxy Watch 5, albeit the device could only host an old GTA game (well, what did you expect?) namely Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (released way back in 2002).

How was this achieved? As TechRadar spotted, by installing a PSP emulator on the smartwatch, the Redditor (ZenonDesingk) was playing GTA: Vice City and the likes of God of War, or Need for Speed: Most Wanted on the device.

For controls, ZenonDesingk bought an Android compatible gamepad (from AliExpress) hooked up via Bluetooth to the Galaxy Watch.

It's seriously impressive stuff and we're told the games run pretty smoothly, meaning at 60 FPS (albeit God of War is more demanding, and drops down to more like 30 FPS, but only at times).

The Redditor had to do quite a bit of jumping through various technical hoops to get this to work, as you might imagine, and it involved side-loading APKs onto the smartwatch via the Bugjaeger app (a 'multitool' for Android devs that can be used for all manner of tricks).

We wouldn't recommend you try this yourself, mind, not just because of the complexity in this kind of messing around, but the veritable minefield of copyright issues involved, from all sorts of angles. Because of that, we'd very much recommend that you don't follow in this Redditor's footsteps, certainly from a legal perspective.

That said, it's undeniably cool to see these kinds of shenanigans going on with devices that have no right running full-on video games - even if, given the screen size here, it's hardly a practical exercise anyway.

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Darren has written for numerous magazines and websites in the technology world for almost 30 years, including TechRadar, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Computeractive, and many more. He worked on his first magazine (PC Home) long before Google and most of the rest of the web existed. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, going to the gym, and writing books (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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