Xiaomi Unveils WinPlay Engine With Support for Windows PC Games on Android

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Xiaomi might soon allow Windows PC games to run on its lineup of Android tablets, according to a recent teaser shared by the company on social media. It is said to be testing a new system called WinPlay which brings support for Windows games to Xiaomi tablets. While still under development, Xiaomi says that its WinPlay Engine will result in only a marginal GPU performance loss when playing. It is also claimed to support Steam and its large repository of PC games too.

The company showcased its WinPlay Engine in a post on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. Xiaomi claims it results in a loss of only 2.9 percent in terms of GPU performance when playing games. Since it is under development, Xiaomi is recruiting volunteer testers in China to use its engine. Currently, this program is limited to Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro owners. The device is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset and is paired with up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage.

The WinPlay Engine is powered by Xiaomi's HyperCore — a self-developed underlying kernel technology platform which is claimed to improve performance, graphics, network, and security. It was introduced with the company's Android 15-based HyperOS 2 in October.

The company's kernel architecture features a proprietary microarchitecture scheduler, which can reduce the idle time of the CPU by 19 percent. Further, it results in up to 54.9 percent faster app launch speeds on smartphones by optimising task cycles and memory latency.

HyperCore has been developed by a team of over 3,000 engineers to achieve optimisation for more than 25,000 scenarios.

Xiaomi says its WinPlay Engine will support Steam and its library of games. However, it remains unknown if other storefronts, such as the Epic Games Store and GOG will also be supported.