Puzzles and Survival mobile game on BlueStacks X from Windows 10 - Minimum Settings

I installed BlueStacks X to try and run some mobile games from my Windows 10 desktop, for purposes of saving my phone battery from being drained so quickly.  My initial experience was a little rocky as games kept crashing.  After some tweaking I was able to find some stability.  If you have plenty of resources on your desktop, great, go ahead and use the Performance setting and have everything at High.  I didn't have that luxury on my Windows 10 desktop with an AMD Ryzen 5 CPU and 16 GB RAM, as I have multiple apps running including virtual machines (on a similar note, I did try out an Android 9 x86 VM from OS Boxes but most Android games are ARM-based and wouldn't install).  I read that BlueStacks will work because it's emulating ARM, but this does come at a performance cost.

Here is a screenshot of the strategy game Puzzles and Survival running in BlueStacks:






Initially, I had tried to get it to run using Medium (2 CPU) and 2 GB of RAM, but the game kept crashing and was practically unusable to navigate around the map.  I then increased the memory to 4 GB and the game was a tad better, but quite slow compared to running the game natively from my Google Pixel 4a 5G. However, at these settings of 2 CPU and 4 GB RAM, the kept frequently froze when switching between the world map/HQ/campaign views.


I had also tried playing around with the Graphics settings but this didn't seem to make much difference for me.  I read that OpenGL was best for most cases and to disable ASTC textures.  My GPU on my main Windows 10 Desktop is not a gaming GPU, just a basic home/business GPU card (AMD Radeon HD 5450).



Comments

  1. AuthorJuly 23, 2024 at 8:10 AM

    There's also a native PnS download for Windows! I wasn't aware of this, but you can visit the official site and install it. I did this and can confirm it is smoother than going through BlueStacks. It's still useful if you want to emulate an Android device on your Windows machine however!

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