Mobile gaming is all the rage these days because a smartphone is usually more accessible than a gaming full fledged gaming laptop. On top of this, a games on the smartphone can be accessed at anytime and anywhere. Mobile gaming has sparked a whole new paradigm of social interactions. If you’re someone who takes his or her mobile gaming seriously and may not necessarily have the best hardware, here are some ways you can improve your chances of coming out on top.
A lot of times, incoming notifications or background refresh of apps could utilize the precious RAM on your phone for an instant and in that one fleeting moment, you may miss that headshot you’ve been getting ready for. Various smartphone manufacturers bake a game mode into the operating system so that when you’re gaming, the game has access to every resource it needs for a flawless experience.
While mobile games don’t offer the advanced flexibility of tweaking graphic settings, some games will allow you to choose a graphical setting that is optimized for your smartphone’s hardware. If your phone’s display is lesser than 6 inches, you could get away with a lowered graphics setting, especially if your priority is smooth gaming over visual fidelity.
Heat is not your phone’s friend, especially when it comes to the CPU/GPU. Long gaming sessions generate internal heat, but holding the phone for long also contributes to the problem. Try playing in an area where the ambient temperatures are cool, like an air-conditioned room.
One way to truly free up RAM would be to turn off or disable unneeded background services. This will allow for RAM to remain free for your games, and consequently, won’t result in random, momentary frame drops. Background services that you can safely turn off (and should turn off) are those for your e-mail and Facebook. You could even go ahead and disable all social media and messaging apps (only while you’re gaming though) as they are constantly pinging their respective servers to fetch new content.
We have typically observed in our extensive testing that smartphone chipsets tend to perform best when the battery levels are closer to 100 percent. When the battery levels drop to 40 percent or so, the power delivery to the chipset from the battery can drop a little, causing the performance of the SoC to also falter. This becomes especially noticeable once the battery drops to 25 percent or so, even causing heating at this point. Suffice to say, it is best to keep the phone’s battery topped up when a gaming session is coming up.
If you know your way around Android OS, then you know the developer options are a treasure trove of settings. However, you will first need to turn on developer options, guides for which are a dime a dozen online. There are, however, some settings you can change around to get better performance out of your phone, and especially your games. One such setting is the 4xMSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing) which improves the visual quality of your games. However, turning this setting on will tax your chipset and definitely drain your battery a lot faster than normal. So do ensure to turn it off after you’re done gaming.
The joy of being part of the Android world means that for many, there’s an abundance of custom ROMs and kernels available. Many smartphones will have performance-focussed custom ROMs available for them, and some smartphones even allow the flashing of custom kernels, which unlock a whole new world of system-level customisations. If you do resort to the flashing of custom ROMs or Kernels, do know that there is a strong possibility of something going wrong and your phone being bricked. Do this at your very own risk and only if you are intimately familiar with the workings of Android.
Finally, if you’re a fan of one particular game, you can always look for apps or tips, for that game on the internet. This may not be the case for all games, but most popular games do have plenty of help available online.