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The successor to GPD’s XD Plus has been a long time in the making. For a while there it seemed GPD had moved on to new pastures with their Windows based mini laptops and gaming devices. But here we are, the handheld once rumoured to be the XD2 has been officially announced, and will be known as the GPD XP. MODULARITY AND CONTROLS
Along with the change in SoC, there will be some other minor improvements in the way of UFS 3.1 storage, faster charging and WiFi 6. It also looks to support video output via the USB-C port. We tried the Xbox Cloud Gaming beta for Android and it works great with high end games such as Forza Horizon 5. You do need a subscription to Xbox Game Pass to use this. It essentially lets you stream games from the Microsoft servers to your GPD XP Plus gaming handheld. We had no problems with the streaming quality or drops in WiFi speed, especially with the router being around 15 metres across the office. It all works great! Screen Mapping Software At first glance, the GPD XP looks a lot like a mobile phone slotted into a snug fitting controller. The superfluous hole punch front facing camera certainly adds to that aesthetic, as does that crazy wide LCD. We know that the LCD is 6.81″, and looking at some phones with the same size screen it seems likely to be a 20:9 aspect ratio. Not all games machines make good emulation machines, and we already know that Android MOBA gamers are one of the target demographics for this handheld. For games such as those, having a wider screen is perhaps very beneficial, allowing a wider view of the action around you. Overall the GPD XP Plus is a great improvement over the original model in terms of performance. We saw from the benchmarks that there is around a 50-60% difference in single and multi-core performance. This gives us a much faster overall experience both in emulators and Android games. The GPD XP’s most novel feature is perhaps the modularity of the controller. As rumoured last year, the controller on the right hand side is detachable, and the reason for this seems to be for better support of MOBA style games. MOBAs are apparently often played using the touchscreen on the right side for camera controls. The modular slimline controller allows easy reach to the screen, as well as providing five additional action buttons. Alternatively, a blanking plate allows full use of the right side of the screen including any on screen buttons. Thank you to The Phawx for the explanation, I am old and haven’t a clue.Storage has also been upgraded from UFS 2.1 to UFS 3.1 for faster data transfer speeds. And wireless capabilities have been bumped up from WiFi 5 to WiFi 6. What is actually possible? Quite a lot. This doesn’t feel like the usual case where companies list every console while knowing full well there’s no way it runs everything. The GPD XP, however, does seem like it’s in this ballpark. The XD Plus has sold lots of units since its release and has enjoyed relative success, but we know that GPD can do and must do better. For a console with a similar price tag to the Creoqode Lyra, it has to be on top of its game not just on release day, but two, three, and even four years afterwards.
I was not getting great performance with Citra. We did update to the latest version and noticed in a few games there were graphics issues, so maybe the update is a bit rubbish. It is a work in progress emulator, but either way, the GPD XP Plus is not quite powerful enough to run everything at full speed. Dolphin Emulator Given that, it looks as though the GPD XP isn’t really designed with emulation in mind. Rather for native Android gaming and in particular FPS and MOBA type games. It’s a shame, even a 16:9 screen could have helped to bridge the disparity between these two gaming worlds. However, if you’re part of the target demographic then this form factor is probably quite enticing. GPD XP SPECS PlayStation will work with no issues at all on the GPD XP Plus retro games handheld. There are different RetroArch cores you can use which have all kinds of filters and upscaling which you can use to improve the visuals. PPSSPP Emulator – PlayStation Portable As for a worldwide release, GPD is keeping shtum. It could be a case of the money raised from the IndieGoGo will be used to help launch the product in further territories as is the case with many other companies, but nothing is confirmed at this point. What Can the GPD XP Plus Emulate?The following specs are currently rumoured, but are the communities best guess at what the GPD XD 2 specs actually are, we will update this as and when we get the full facts! The button layout on the XD Plus was pretty good in all honesty, though it felt a little cramped, almost as though the designers didn’t want to encroach on the space where their touch-screen might have been if this were a DS. That is a really weird choice to go with. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3 for the older systems, and 16:9 for the more recent retro consoles. Oh, and the Game Boy Advance with 3:2, because it’s Nintendo and we don’t question it. One of the main problems that the GPD XD 2 needs to overcome is the firmware it uses to play the vast catalogue of games available to it.
Nintendo: NES, Super Nintendo,Game Boy Advance, Game Boy, Game Boy Colour,N64,Nintendo DS, GameCube, Wii But unless this is all an early April fools joke, GPD appear to want to keep the XP product line alive. They’ve just announced a new revision, now called the GPD XP Plus. If you were GPD, what changes would you make to the product? A normal width screen perhaps? Removal of that hole punch camera in the bottom left of the LCD? Get rid of the superfluous modular controllers? Maybe even a return to the clamshell design that so many people have begged them for. Changing any of the things that the internet said were weird and wrong about the product would be a great start. Virtua Tennis has built in gamepad support so you do not need to set up screen mapping. Everything works great with no slow downs during gameplay. Horizon Chase
Moving on to some higher powered consoles now. We start off with the PlayStation 2 and the AetherSX2 emulator. Do bear in mind that this emulator is very much work in progress so performance can change between releases. PS2 emulator on GPD XP Plus Next is the turn of the SEGA Saturn emulator Yabasanshiro. We tried a few different games and the performance is very good. Playing through the race we, are getting 60 frames per second with no visible slow down. We did see the frames drop very rarely to say 58 for a split second, but you would not notice unless you had the FPS showing. Mupen64Plus Emulator Well, the GPD XP Plus features a more powerful flagship MediaTek Dimensity 1200 chip under the hood, compared to the MediaTek Helio G95 found on yesteryear’s model. The SoC is said to provide a better gaming experience as it comes in an octa-core configuration, 4 Cortex A78 high-performance cores + 4×A55 efficient cores, powered by ARM’s Mali-G77 MC9 GPU and with speedy 4266Mbps LPDDR4x memory. In addition, the Dimensity 1200 features the MediaTek HyperEngine 3.0 which enhances the gaming performance to 2.5 times more than the flagship Snapdragon 845 chip.
Horizon Chase is another game that has built in support for gamepads. The game blazes along at a great frame rate and I did not have any issues at all. Genshin Impact Genshin Impact Mobile with controller support GPD is a Chinese tech company that primarily creates laptops and tablets. In the same way that Hard Kernel created the ODROID GO and the ODROID GO Advance, GPD used their computing wizardry to create a clamshell handheld with an Android operating system, the GPD XD Plus. Is the GPD XP Plus worth it? That’s hard to say. Every year we see companies release a plus version, which is pretty much the same thing with some slight modifications. In this case, GPD has improved the internal specs. The original GPD XP struggled with higher-end emulation. These changes, then, should offer up more compatibility.
With excitement building over both the N64 Mini and the Dreamcast Mini, people want their retro handhelds to be able to recreate their favourite home-console adventures of yesteryear with ease. Pro Evo 2010 on the other hand runs just fine and is extremely playable. We did try some other games and it’s definitely a mix of what works and doesn’t. Some of this is down to the emulator compatibility and performance, and some is simply the XP Plus is not powerful enough. Citra Emulator Citra emulator
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