For the most part you can’t really do demanding gaming on a pixel. For emulation and playing PC games you pretty much need a snapdragon.
Most mobile gaming people do are with apks through the playstore and flagship phones from 8~ years ago can still run those games pretty much maxed out besides frame rates. Pixel will play your call of duty mobiles and gebshin impact fine.
Even recently I learned termux now allows gpu pass thorough on snapdragon phones from 610+. Most projects I cone across favor the 645 if you don’t have one of the new series. And those chips are ancient and still put up good performance even if it is short lived due to thermals/boosting.
Not saying its not possible or you can’t have a good experience with things like gamecube. I think for most people you really don’t need anything past like a oneplus 5/6 in terms of specs. Just if you wanted to get into fex/switch emulation you are probably going to want to go with a snapdragon device. They have arm based hand helds with dual screens and controllers built in, and just having a dedicated device for gaming might be a better option. Out side of that having a more performant phone has minimal improvements to your average experience, in the play store there isnt much of anything that can really utilize it. There’s maybe 5-10 graphically demanding games, and they where all made to work with phones from 10 years ago.
I try not to worry too much about it but it really feels like there is a ticking clock on getting some form of collaboration going to a android/Linux really phone going. More and more I have been internalizing that ticking clock.
Everything is slowly in the process of getting locked down and requiring verified accounts on verified spyware operating systems.
Ai is kind of the DRM for what used to be free access to information. Ever sense google and openai bought reddits api rights we can’t use third party apps, and now its to the point you can’t access content without being logged in and using the app. And in some countries you can’t even use your account without a ID linked to it.
I can’t watch YouTube on newpipe or other open source projects without having to switch my IP every few hours. Reddit and YouTube is where most google searches end up in. I could be locked out of basic internet functions, and information completely. Trying to force me to filter my information through an ai that’s always tracking me and all my meta data ends up with palantir creating profiles on me.
In the united States we are fine for now but given how the rest of the world is looking I imagine our time is coming sooner rather than later. Googles captcha is only going to work on verified android hardware in the future so they are building up literal gates to anyone who doesnt comply.
I’m the stupidest person in the world and I don’t like the pressure I feel for how little this issue is addressed when it feels like it should be of immediate concern. I had much more faith that there where plenty of actually smart people working towards this, and when you really get into it, there’s only handfuls of people and they’re really fragmented.