[Music] after my initial early look at the retroid pocket 4 Pro it's now time to fully dive in and see how the retroid pocket 4 Pro stands up to my in-depth testing for those that haven't seen my early look the retroid pocket 4 Pro is the latest from retroid and is the sequel to the incredibly popular retroid Pocket 3 plus and retains the same 169 screen in a horizontal form factor but now packs an extra punch with the inclusion of the demens city 1100 so please join me Rob the retr tech dad as we explore everything that the pocket 4 Pro offers and determine whether the 4 Pro is the worthy successor to retroid pocket 3 [Music] [Music] plus let's roll out the specs for the retroid pocket 4 Pro which is equipped with a 4.7 in 169 touchscreen display at a resolution of 750x 1334 with 500 nits of brightness this is identical to the retroid pocket 3 plus it is powered by the mediatech dimensity 1100 with four cortex a78 cores at 2.6 GHz and 4 a55 cores at 2 GHz it uses the Molly g77 m C9 GPU clocked at 836 MHz the pocket 4 Pro comes with 8 GB of LP DDR 4X RAM and 128 GB of ufs 3.1 internal storage with the option to expand via the micro SD slot the pocket 4 Pro features USB type-c for data charging and 1080p video out as well as 3.5 mm headset port and micro HDMI the pocket 4 pro has built-in Wi-Fi 6 80211 ax and Bluetooth 5.2 support the 4 pro has has a 5,000 mAh battery and it ships with Android 13 out of the box it is available now directly from the retroid website and retroid is shipping units out on a daily basis moving as fast as they can to get orders out the 4 Pro is available in six different color options and is available for $199 plus any applicable shipping fees and taxes I want to thank retroid again for sending me this unit for the purpose of this review and as I always require they did not view this video prior to publishing it's time to unbox and this is definitely very familiar packaging for any prior owners of the retroid devices the packaging itself is very minimalistic with just a few markings for The Branding and then the color options and there are six available including black 16bit 16bit us watermelon ice blue and Crystal the unit I have here is the black one all right let's cut the seal and then open up the flap to reveal what is [Music] inside let's go ahead and pull out the insert so we can check out the contents of the package [Music] okay I'll pull the outer box to the side for now and let's remove the top protective foamy insert so we can get the pocket 4 Pro out of its plastic tray we're going to put this aside for a moment while we check out the rest of the contents we have the users manual looking right at us and this is a simple paper insert that details the features of the unit and specifications nothing too in-depth here finally we have the USB a to type-c Cable it's pretty hefty feeling and a decent length I do like the retroid pocket branding that that is now on the USB cable this is a nice little touch all right we're all done here let's grab the pocket 4 Pro and slowly take it out of its protective plastic baggie to reveal the device as I mentioned earlier I received the black unit and just First Impressions in the hand the plastic feels really nice on here and reminds me of the plastic from the transparent models of the 3+ so let's now take a tour around the pocket 4 Pro and get familiar with all the features available here let's start out the top right and take a look at the shoulder button and Trigger the R1 has a very very nice texture going across the entirety of the button I'm able to press down on the R1 from any point which is always something that I like to see I like the way these press down they give off a light sounding clickiness but it does press down really well the shoulder trigger here is a nice improvement over the pocket 3 plus these are now analog and have a solid range of movement which is also nice and smooth and doesn't have a very stiff resistance the R2 is larger than what was present on the 3 plus and so I find that it accommodates your fingers better plus with the addition of the nice texturing the trigger here feels really good good so let's move along and things are quite different here than what we had with the pocket 3+ starting first we have the power button which is where the start and select were located on the 3+ next to the power we have the volume up and down and then besides that we have the exhaust vent which is needed for the active cooling built into the 4 Pro and finally the micro HDMI port which is one of two ways to have the display out on the pocket 4 Pro on the left side we can take a really Sol look at that texture that is now on the L1 and L2 much like the right side everything presses down the same way as well as well as smooth movement for the trigger going down the left side and there isn't anything here which is a difference from the 3+ which kept the volume up and down on this side now coming to the bottom of the 4 Pro we have the left stereo speaker and these are down firing much like they were on the 3+ similar to the 3+ we have the micro SD slot that is protected by a cover that pops out to reveal the slot I've always liked this approach as it helps keep dust and debris out of the slot as well as being much easier to deal with than one that needs a pin next to the micro SD we have the 3.5 mm headset port and then the USB type-c for data charging and video out and finally the right down firing stereo speaker let's now take a look at the back of the unit and I do like this angle as it shows off that nice texturing on the plastic overall again this really reminds me of the way my transparent 3 plus feels versus the smooth solid colors from that model I like the minimal branding on the back which was removed from the front bezel and then of course the sizable intake vent for the active cooling okay time to go front side and check out a close-up of the 4 Pros d-pad which is something that I've always liked for Metroid the four Pros in particular is really good with a nice amount of movement and a good defined pivot which is noticeable when moving from side to side you can really see how much travel we are getting here from this angle below that we have another significant Improvement coming from the 3 plus these analog sticks actually made their first appearance with the pocket 2s and return here to really give the 4 Pro a much improved experience these have a wider range of movement compared to the 3+ and are much closer to a traditional analog stick versus the switch style sticks from before I also much prefer the concave analog stick cap here that is present on the 4 Pro we can get a good look at how these sit above the face of the 4 Pro which do sit a bit higher than we saw with the 3+ and not all that surprising given the new sticks here moving down we have another new addition coming from the 3 plus which is the inclusion of the home and back buttons on the face of the 4 Pro and going across the front bezel as I mentioned before The retroid Branding has been completely removed here now on the right side let's take a closer look at the face buttons probably noticed that I have Skittles buttons here and these were taken from my pocket 2s which we will definitely be talking about more in my tear down portion you can get a look at the original setup in my early look video the buttons are arranged in the ba YX Nintendo style out of the box and it is also the way I have it set up here I do really like the way these pressed down and because we have slightly larger buttons here they are also easier to press down on taking a look from the side and you can see how much travel these have as well as how they sit above the face of the 4 Pro one thing I want to comment on is that the buttons are a bit noisier than I'd like below the face buttons we have the right analog stick and then below that many will be very happy to see that the select and start buttons have been moved to the face of the unit both the select and start as well as the home and back buttons are using Dome switches and are very quiet to press down on let's go ahead and boot up the pocket 4 Pro for the first time and quickly go through the first time setup process which will definitely be a familiar site for anyone that has used one of Retro's other products I've always liked this as a makes the handheld feel less like a phone and more like a device that has dedicated controls you can use both the touchscreen or built-in controls to navigate here and this is where you will be setting up things like your language Wi-Fi as well as choosing which apps you want pre-installed personally I go ahead and just install all of them and then decide after the fact what I don't want anymore there's a good chance you will probably update some of the emulators that are part of this pre-installed process but regardless it is nice that this is part of the setup experience and one last step which is the launcher that you'll be using retroid does have their own launcher which is very simple and again makes the 4 Pro feel more like a handheld but for now we will be selecting the standard Android Launcher so we can take a look at what everything looks like in Android first and then head over into the retroid launcher welcome to the main screen of the pocket 4 Pro this is using Android 13 and like most of Retro's other devices is a very clean install of Android the pocket 4 Pro does include Google Play services for those that want access to the Play Store outside of the apps that I chose to pre-install this is very vanilla which leaves you to customize the way you like let's take a look at the quick access menu which can be reached by dragging down from the top this is fairly standard for Android and includes the usual options such as toggling on Wi-Fi Bluetooth and airplane mode a point of interest for this device is the performance toggle which allows us to switch between three different presets including standard performance and high performance for each of these options we have the ability to adjust some settings for the fan on standard we can completely turn the fan off as well as change to quiet smart and Sport for performance we are limiting to quiet smart and Sport and finally for the high performance option we are limited to just smart and Sport let's quickly look at the rest of the options here and as typical for Android you can add edit or remove the buttons here let's dive into the handheld settings which does feature unique options made for the pocket 4 Pro this is where you can make adjustments to the display out functionality as well as the inputs including switching from the switch style to Xbox style in software before we move on I did want to show off a little bit of Retro's own launcher as I mentioned this has a pretty minimalistic interace interface and for the most part pretty easy to get set up if we go into the systems portion on the bottom we can select the consoles that we want displayed here so I will go ahead and quickly pick some consoles to demonstrate the way it looks with my choices made you can see how this looks here with nice simple icons for each console now I haven't added any games yet so when I go into one of the consoles nothing will be displayed here but it's also pretty simple to get your games pointed by just clicking on ROMs at the bottom and then point to the path where they are stored for that specific platform and so this is just a very quick overview of the Retro launcher and the beautiful thing about Android is that you can really use any launcher you prefer including something like the popular D show so let's talk about the build quality of the pocket 4 Pro which immediately feels very solid the first time you hold it I think overall the materials being used here are really solid the 4 Pro shows no signs of flexing or even creaking when bending it and nothing is rattling including the shoulder or face buttons the buttons d-pad triggers and analog sticks are all working as expected there is nothing rough or unfinished about the entirety of the unit the black which is the the color that was sent to me and not my own personal choice surprised me because of how nice the material feels here but also how it has held up pretty well to fingerprints I've actually not wiped down the back of this unit in some time since returning from CES a few weeks ago the panel being used here is very nice with good colors and brightness it's a 4.7 in 169 750x 1334 panel similar to the one used in the 3+ the viewing angles are equally good with no issues looking at the panel from top down or side to side additionally the bright scales quite well going from a fairly bright panel with 500 nits of brightness down to a very low level suitable for dark environments the audio from the down firing speakers actually surprised me I would have loved to see retro put some front firing speakers in this maybe around the top of the unit by the face buttons and d-pad however the speakers that are present here get very loud at the top end I was worried that my palms would obstruct the speakers given their location but in my time gaming I haven't really experienced that as an issue since they are far enough in that my Palms don't actually cover them let's take a listen here with the soothing sounds of outrun 2 to get a nice sense of these stereo [Music] speakers and of course my usual marel versus Capcom 2 d-pad test and the 4 Pro didn't surprise me as I expected it to perform quite well the movement of the d-pad is so good that it makes pulling off combos an absolute Joy more importantly the d-pad is responsive and probably only limitation here is my own skills in Marvel vs Capcom 2 you can see on screen that I am moving around pulling off combos without much trouble and the retroid d-pad is for me at least one of the better ones on the market now something that I talked about during my early look was the green tint present in the image retroid at the time was aware of the issue and promised to correct this with an OTA update which my device did receive and it does correct this I am glad that this was resolved in a timely manner and Retail units should not have this issue I'll bring in my pocket 3 plus again just to compare the screen here and it's definitely apparent that this issue has now been corrected which is great to see and should give most viewers a peace of mind and we've now arrived at one of my favorite portions since it's an opportunity for me to bring in other devices for our size comparisons on screen I have the original switch Odin light the Retro pocket 4 Pro and a surprisingly highly requested comparison device the PlayStation V it's quite apparent immediately that these are all very different size devices let's start with some weights on the Retro pocket 4 Pro which comes in at 268 G or about 9 1/2 oz next up we have the PS Vita which comes in at under 8 oz or about 220 G here we have the OG switch with joycons attached coming in at 14 oz or about 398 G finally the Odin Pro which comes in at 361 G or a little under 13 O and does have a slightly larger 6-in screen I thought this was an interesting device to include given it is now the same price as the pocket 4 Pro let's grab the measurements of the 4 Pro quickly just to remind ourselves of the actual numbers here the face buttons on the 4 Pro are larger than what we have with the 3+ they come in at just 7 mm and these two s buttons you see here are identical in size to the ones on the 4 Pro and we will be doing the swap in this video in just a little bit the analog stick cap measures in at about 13 1. 12 mm and finally the thickness which is about 16 mm let's compare the size of the 4 Pro to the Odin light here which does share the same size as the Odin Pro seen hiding in the upper left corner of the screen the Oden light is a good bit larger than the 4 Pro which is expected here given a larger screen size with the overhead view it does appear that the 4 Pro and onite share a similar thickness and the Oden light is just a little over 15 mm so the two are very close the face buttons on the Odin are slightly larger coming in at a little over 7 mm the analog stick caps here are definitely small smaller coming in at 13 mm and personally one of my negatives with both the light and pro let's check out how the Vita sizes up to the 4 Pro which again was a requested device the 4 Pro and Vita are almost about the same width but the Vita is a little bit taller the Vita face buttons are definitely smaller coming in about 6 1/2 mm with smaller analog sticks but it is thinner than the 4 Pro coming in at a little under 15 mm finally the original switch with joycon attached which looks massive compared to the 4 Pro in terms of thickness the do seem quite similar but let's quickly measure and it does appear that the switch is thinner at about 14 mm it's no secret that the face buttons on the joycon are small and these are smaller than the 4 Pro coming in at under 7 mm surprisingly the analox to caps on the switch are slightly larger at about 14 1 12 mm for further comparisons and measurements I recommend checking out my early look video where I size up the 4 Pro to the 2s pocket 3 plus and the Odin 2 it's now time for our tear down and for this there's going to be a few go in mind I like using the tear Downs as an opportunity to see how difficult it is to reach the battery for replacement if needed as well as how accessible certain components are like the analog sticks now for the 4 Pro in particular I want to see if the face buttons are in fact Hardware swappable as well as check if they're compatible with the buttons from the retroid pocket 2s which if you've been watching sort of has been spoiled so on the back of the unit we have four screws present these are using Torx screws so I'll grab my trusty iix a kit and size up the appropriate bit for this I am using the Torx T5 bit and let's go ahead and quickly remove the four screws from the back plate as always make sure to remove your micro SD card if you have one present before moving on okay with all the screws out let's pop off this back cover I'm using a pleum or just a guitar pick to help separate the shell so I went in from the top and was able to wedge the pick in and help separate some of those tabs moving gently across the top and you can hear the tabs continuing to separate at this point I am able to remove the rest of the back plate by hand don't be afraid to put a little force on here to get the cover off as there's nothing connected to the back cover so don't worry about accidentally prying something off unsurprisingly the back cover is made of a fairly flexible plastic but that's not an issue as it helps keep the weight down this is a little bit different than how something like the 2s is set up for example the shoulder triggers are actually part of the back blate so let's take a closer look at the mechanism here we now have a a nice look at the internals of the pocket 4 Pro with the back cover removed there's definitely some very obvious components staring at us including the fan massive heat sink and battery I have to say that I'm impressed with how clean everything looks inside including the use of the black colored boards here we can see the included 5,000 mAh battery and I'll be talking a lot more about battery life in just a bit so it does appear that the analog sticks can be easily swapped out they are not buried under any other boards and the connection cable as well as screws to remove it are fully accessible let's confirm this by actually removing it we will need to switch up our bit and all these screws internally are just standard phillips screws there are two screws holding down the analog stick in place so let's quickly remove them and then carefully disconnect the cable from the daughter board once done you can see how easy it is to remove the stick from the 4 Pro this is awesome to see for anyone needing to do Replacements or even just to mess around with alternative colors that are available for sale on the retroid website so let's dig deeper now and get to the face button so I can check out a few things I'm wondering about again I have to comment about how nicely put together everything is here we even have Captain tape placed down to secure connections we're going to need to remove the daughter board and in order to do that we do need to remove the speaker here to get access to a screw that is hidden underneath the speaker is secured with a fairly strong tape so you will need a bit of force to get it out make sure to disconnect the cable before removing once removed we now have access to all the screws so it looks like there are four screws that need to be removed let's go ahead and quick quickly do that now let's disconnect the rest of the cables there is one on the side here covered with Captain tape and another at the top for the R1 button gently remove the tape so you can save it for use later and then gently disconnect the cable for the R1 as well the daughterboard should now be very easy to remove you can see that we have the pads for the rubber membranes on the face buttons and then the Dome switches for the start and select [Music] buttons let's now take a closer look at the face buttons starting with a rubber membrane looking at the membrane from the side and it's pretty apparent why the travel is quite good on the 4 Pro this is a really solid membrane and now we can get really close up with the way the face buttons are keyed so looking at this it does appear that these will require a modification to the buttons themselves in order to make them swappable as you can see swapping the B button to the original a position and this will not fit as is the same can be set for the a button now the retroid website does state that these are Hardware swappable but I did confirm that that they do need a slight modification for that you will need to cut off the third peg in order to make them swappable it's important to note that the retroid website now shows this under the DIY section for replacement buttons that you can buy I've had quite a few viewers ask me about the pocket 2s buttons and whether or not they will be swappable into the pocket 4 Pro now in my early look I did measure the buttons and these were identical in size so off camera I did take apart my 2s to get it prepped for this video let's first compare the two membranes here and these definitely look pretty identical now I'm already noticing that these might be keyed differently but let's take the Skittles buttons out of the 2s and try to place them into the 4 Pro starting with the B button this one fits without any modification moving along to the Y button which also fits and then the a button which fits as well and finally the x button which surprisingly does not fit in the 4 Pro that's pretty wild to me you can see in the palm of my hand how these are keyed differently so I grabbed the Sharpie and I carefully marked off part of the PEC to then clip off so I can make it fit into the 4 Pro shell clipping the excess piece off and now the button can fit without [Music] issue this is definitely nice to know as retroid does sell some unique colors for the 2s that can now work on the 4 Pro if you desire for example I think the white buttons from the Indigo model will be pretty popular I've got to say I actually really like the way the skills buttons look with the black 4 Pro and I'm thinking of keeping it this way but I'm curious to hear what my viewers think so definitely let me know down in the comments it's now time to return to our tear down and continue to see what is needed to gain full access to the battery here we will need to remove the heat sink assembly which is held into place by four screws two of which are hidden under protective tape let's quickly get these four screws out of here so we can move along with all the screws out of the way carefully disconnect the cable from the main board we can now take a look at the heat sink and fan which is pretty substantial and it's nice to see the active cooling presence so that we can push that dimensity 1100 a bit harder than normal now with that heating out of the way we finally have access to the battery connection and can now unplug and remove the battery for removal so this is the process that would be needed to get to the battery for replacement or servicing as usual the battery is held into place with a strong adhesive there are actually small tabs that you pull out to remove the adhesive to make the battery lift out of place easily and so with all of that let's get this back together and then dive back into benchmarking and in my first round for my early look I compared the performance between the t618 and the Retro pocket 3 plus to the demens 1100 in the pocket 4 Pro this time around I want to compare the numbers between the different performance profiles of the pocket 4 Pro as well as bring in some other chipsets and devices to see where the DSA 1100 and the retroid pocket 4 Pro stand first let's compare the three profiles of standard performance and high performance built into the pocket 4 Pro and see how that translates to synthetic benchmarks let's first discuss the geekbench 6 numbers which will give us a good idea of the CPU performance between the three different profiles in standard mode with the fan turned off the pocket 4 Pro scored 830 in the single core score and 3,41 in the multi-core score in performance mode with the smart fan setting the pocket 4 Pro scored 983 in the single core score and 2933 in the multi-core score so far this tells me that we are seeing a boost in single core perform performance with a slight drop off for multi-core performance finally the high performance mode with the smart fan setting the pocket 4 Pro scored 1,092 in the single core score and 3,46 for the multi-core score it's clear that as we bump up those performance profiles we are definitely seeing a slight boost in performance for that single core score now let's switch gears to the wildlife extreme Benchmark and this will give us a good sense of GPU performance this is probably the most interesting of the benchmarks and first you will see that the pocket 4 Pro scored 1,257 with the standard mode and the fan turned off switching to Performance mode with the smart fan setting and the four Pro scored 1,151 I did retest this multiple times and the scores were very consistent finally the high performance mode with the smart fan setting and the 4 Pro scored 1,268 which based on these results really indicates that the performance profiles are quite comparable between the three now we can take a look at the and22 scores which gives us a good picture overall of the CPU and GPU performance the pocket 4 Pro with the standard performance mode and the fan turned off scored 69,8 n overall now with the 4 Pro Set to Performance mode and the smart fan setting we saw a small increase in the overall score coming in at 63195 finally the high performance mode with the smart fan setting and the 4 Pro scored 72775 overall it's clear that each performance profile does in fact scale as expected with a high performance option giving us the best performance okay now let's bring in a few other devices into the picture for this I wanted to bring in both the Odin light and Odin Pro these two devices are actually being offered for essentially the same price right now as the pocket 4 Pro and therefore is essentially a competitor to the 4 pro at around that $199 price point the Odin light has the dimensity 900 which will also give us an idea of what to expect with the standard pocket for once that ships and then the Odin Pro with its Snapdragon 845 for fun I am throwing in the Odin 2 because at its price point it is really the one to beat when it comes to high-end Android gaming despite the additional $100 cost so in geekbench 6 bringing in the Odin Pro which scored 569 for its single core score and 259 for its multi-core score we can see that the Snapdragon 845 falls behind the demens city 1100 it's not much of a surprise here the Snapdragon 845 is definitely showing its age and now we have the Odin light and the demens city 900 which scored 923 for its single core score and 2381 for its multi-core score which does slightly outperform the Snapdragon 845 but Falls a little behind the density 1100 and finally I don't think it's going to be much of a surprise here but the Odin 2 with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 scored 1,983 for its single core score and 5,462 for its multicore score which absolutely destroys all the devices on screen much of the same thing can be seen with the wildlife extreme test with the Odin Pro coming in at 632 and not too far behind it the Odin light with 593 however the pocket 4 Pro nearly doubles the score of the Odin Pro and Odin light and again the Odin 2 coming in with 3,699 which absolutely destroys the other scores finally in an tutu we're seeing much of the same story here with the Odin Pro coming in at 375,000 for its overall score and then the Odin light coming in at 483,000 tests lags behind the dimensity 1100 and the retroid pocket 4 Pro the Odin 2 with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 much like the other tests runs away with a commanding jump in scores over all the other devices here there's no doubt that the Odin 2 is an absolute Powerhouse one last thing I wanted to check was the demens 1100 thermal stability which is actually solid across all three performance profiles however I did observe throttling when doing battery testing with God of War II and had to change my battery testing strategy I had the retroid pocket 4 Pro Set to standard performance with the fan turned off and scaled back the resolution to just native and just about an hour into my test I noticed that we were starting to see thermal throttling happening with God of War II which was no longer hitting 60 frames per second now I thought it was important to disclose my findings since 1 hour in is not a lot of time and many viewers will be gaming for this amount of time in one city but we will definitely be talking about thermals and Battery testing and all that in just a little bit okay with benchmarking out of the way let's go ahead and revisit visit emulation this time around I wanted to include some viewer requests since many viewers suggested great games that I thought would also be worth testing out performance especially in PS2 and GameCube so now for a little story time I actually got the pleasure of finally meeting Russ for Metro gamec Cor in person and during some talks we realized that we both had experienced different results with PlayStation 2 emulation depending on the game he was surprised when I said that Sly Cooper was running quite well on my pocket 4 Pro which then made us realize that the versions of ether sx2 actually made a difference I was running the included build of ether sx2 which at the time was the 3064 one but I've also personally tested the 3668 build and can confirm that Sly Cooper runs the same there as well now Russ said he was using Nether sx2 and so at that moment is when we discovered that there were pretty vast differences in performance between builds so I went ahead and tested PlayStation 2 emulation in both ether sx2 using build number 3668 and then again in nether sx2 to see some of the differences no doubt about it Sly Cooper ran very poorly in nether sx2 which you can see on screen and now let me switch back to the 3668 build of ether sx2 and you can see that Sly Cooper does vastly better here this is being done at two times the NAT resolution using the ntsc version with the Vulcan backend and the retroid pocket 4 Pro Set to its high performance mode with the smart fan option interestingly I observed this difference in other games this time around I saw this happen in another viewer requested game champions of norrath is another very demanding game to run for PS2 m ulation and in the 3668 build of ether sx2 Champions ran poorly however if we switch back to Nether sx2 you can see the game is fairing a lot better once again I have this game set to two times native resolution with the Vulcan backend and I am using the ntsc version the Retro pocket 4 Pro is set to high performance mode with the smart fan option so for Champions my results were the opposite of what I experienced with SL Hooper Jack 2 was another viewer requested game and definitely one well worth checking out as it's another very difficult game to emulate and so this is another great test of the pocket 4 Pros abilities for Jack 2 I experienced similar results as I did with Champions and for this game Jack 2 was mostly a poor experience with the 3668 build of ether sx2 in fact for this game you're going to most likely want to use the poom to try and get the best performance out of it and when I tested nether sx2 I definitely had better results and while it's still not perfect I found this to be pretty solid overall and actually quite impressive since Jack 2 is so notorious for being difficult for Jack 2 I recommend using nether sx2 with the pal ROM and set to Native resolution using the high performance mode with the smart fan option we are really close here finally one last viewer request a game and another good one to demonstrate some of the capabilities here of the demeny 1100 Gran Turismo 4 actually performed about the same in both Nether sx2 and the 3668 build of ether sx2 I wanted to show a footage of both a city track as well as one of the rally tracks and naturally I decided to go with my hometown of New York City and my current home of Arizona Grant Turismo performs really well on the pocket 4 Pro with two times native resolution the vcan back end using the ntsc version with the 4 Pro Set to high performance mode and the smart fan option so let's quickly talk about PlayStation Portable I don't think it's much of a surprise that the PSP will do quite well with the pocket 4 Pro and we know from my early look that the 4 Pro does bring a sizable performance boost over the 3 plus which was already able to do PSP however we can take things much higher now on PSP and the results are pretty impressive let's start out with one of my personal favorite games to showcase on the lighter end which is loo Roco and it is maxed out with ppss P at 10 times the native resolution and the 4 Pro is set to standard performance with no fan turned on I was expecting locar roko to run quite well here but this is definitely pretty amazing to see and I think many lighter games will have no issues with that Max 10 times upscaling now for a game that is a little bit more demanding and another consistent entry on the channel Ridge Racer on PSP has always been one of my absolute favorite racing games on the platform and really to see it on the 4 Pro screen at eight times native resolution is very impressive it's truly amazing to see how great PSP games look at this resolution as well as with this pixel density you will definitely notice details in games that you've probably never seen before Ridge Racer is another game that's using the standard performance mode with no fan on finally it wouldn't be appropriate to Showcase PlayStation Portable performance without at least one of the God of War games for this one we have chains of Olympus and it's no secret that this is one of the more demanding games for PSP but here we are at five times native resolution with the 4 Pro Set to its performance mode and the quiet fan option one of the key things to remember here is that these games will not require any tweak hacks or special performance cheats to get the level of performance that you are seeing here it's now time to move on to Nintendo's platforms and let's start out with Gamecube which like PlayStation 2 has been the other platform many are excited about with the 4 Pro first things first let's revisit F0 GX now if you missed it from my early look I pinned a note and made a quick video clip showcasing that F0 GX actually does quite well at two times native resolution with the Dolphin Emulator from the Play Store for whatever reason the emulator disables the dual core option by default so you will want to make sure that in your custom configuration you have the dual core option enabled it's definitely very exciting and it's a great thing to see f-zero running this well with Dolphin now for a viewer request wi world was actually just featured in my Raspberry Pi 5 GameCube emulation showcase and it's always a joy to revisit this game I mentioned in that video that this game game is in many ways an overlooked gem that came to us from treasure the brilliant Studio behind hits like karuga and radiant silver gun the pocket 4 Pro is having no issues with this game and the two times upscaling is really helping clean this game up and it just looks fantastic now with the extra power on hand with the pocket 4 Pro I do want to talk a little bit about the Wii it's a platform that I feel doesn't get as much love or attention as GameCube for emulation but on the 4 Pro we definitely have some power on hand to run a good portion of the library the Wii is always tricky to emulate because of its controls but there are a lot of games that let you use a classic controller setup and so I want to shift some Focus to the Wii in my early look video I checked out Mario Galaxy 2 which ran very well so this time around I thought it would be fun to check out another Mario game with new Super Mario Brothers I don't think it's much of a surprise given what we saw in my early look but new Super Mario Brothers does run very well with the 4 Pro again this is using the Dolphin Emulator from the Play Store set to Native resolution using the Vulcan backend and the high performance mode setting with the retroid pocket 4 Pro next I wanted to feature a game that I feel doesn't get as much notice cloa is actually a remake of the original game from the PlayStation and this is an awesome version of the game with really great updated visuals the game looks so good on the Retro pocket Forest screen and it's really a treat to see her running this well cloa is using the same configuration as I did for New Super Mario Brothers and the best part about kenoa is that it easily Maps well to the four proos built-in controls which makes kenoa a great choice for the device finally since we do have the extra power here I wanted to show off the Wii version of Mario Kart I'm excited that we are clearly able to play a lot more of the Wii library with the Retro pocket 4 Pro and I think the Wii is still very much a platform worth exploring with some very unique games and entries I wanted to have some fun and see if we could push the Retro pocket 4 Pro a little bit with Wii emulation and so with Mario Kart Wii I am actually set to two times native resolution and the game does hold up quite well very rarely dipping below the 60 frames per second target especially after initial Shader compilation has taken place let's now switch it up and check out Nintendo's latest platform form in my early look I actually spent a good amount of time showcasing switch emulation with the Yuzu emulator and really I found it very impressive I had games like Super Mario Wonder running on the Retro pocket 4 Pro and it does really demonstrate just how far the Yuzu emulator has come since first dropping on Android I personally just love testing switch emulation out and it's been a pleasant surprise naturally you will not be buying a pocket 4 Pro for the intention of switch emulation but it's a really cool bonus and I'm finding that a lot more is playable than I originally expected on screen I have a personal favorite racing game of mine on the switch which is cruising in blast and it is the perfect balance between updating a franchise as well staying true to what made it great back in the day I love the visuals and the fast-paced gameplay of blast and I have it running here with Yuzu at Native resolution and handheld mode the retroid pocket 4 Pro is set to use the high performance option and really the results are pretty impressive I did receive a viewer request for Sonic Superstars and I thought that would be an interesting one to Showcase and a game I was optimistic would run well here based on my other testing Sonic Superstars is set to 75x resolution in handheld mode and the frame rate is definitely holding up unfortunately the game did exhibit some choppy audio despite the gameplay itself being fine I have a good feeling this one will be fully playable at some point in the near future and let's talk about a fairly new release that I've personally been very excited about the Prince of Persia the Lost Crown is set here to 75x in handheld mode and the retroid pocket 4 Pro is set to high performance this is one that is doing pretty well and for me is really awesome to see on such a compact device I was definitely puzzly surprised to see Prince of perser working with Yuzu and it's definitely perfect timing since I've been working my way through this one being a big fan of the series in general finally I showcased Super Mario Wonder in my early look but this time around I wanted to show off a bit of Super Mario 3D World and Bowser's Fury which surprised me with its performance using Yuzu I do have this game set to use 5x native resolution which gave me the smoothest performance but given the smaller screen here with the 4 Pro I don't feel like image quality has suffered at all here the game still looks very good and vibrant and quite enjoyable to play on the 4 Pro again for me there's a sense of Joy just seeing these games working on the pocket 4 Pro let's Now cover a bit of Android gaming which has always been something that I like to cover on this channel I'm going to start off with a viewer request with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and this is is the Netflix Edition also known as the definitive edition of the game which is available to purchase on the Play Store the game seems to be locked at 30 frames per second and it does hold it quite well based on the built-in frame counter with the 4 Pro the visuals are great here and the built-in controls from the pocket 4 Pro work without any issue it's definitely great to see a game like San Andreas working this well now another viewer request was the mobile version of fortnite and it's definitely one worth checking out given how popular the game is and with the built-in controls makes the 4 Pro an awesome way to play fortnite for this one I let fortnite Auto set the options which default to the high settings at 30 frames per second and the 4 pro has done pretty well here maintaining its Target FPS finally I'll use genin impact as our last Android game and just as quickly show off the built-in Gamepad mapping tool of the 4 Pro if you're familiar with retroid devices this is nothing new and works essentially the same way you simply drag in from the right side and then select key mapping and the menu will appear on screen there are options to drag the left and write analog stick on screen as well as set individual buttons you simply drag the analog sticks where you want them to go and when placed down you can then set additional settings of how the analog sticks react to the action on screen with the button mapping you simply drag the button icon over the location you want it to go and then press the corresponding physical button to map it's a very simple thing to set up and great for games that don't have built-in controller support once you're all done just hit save and you should be good to go by the way genin here is running quite well in medium settings locked to 30 frames per second and this can definitely go a bit higher if you'd like okay after all this gaming let's talk about battery life and I spent a good amount of time here trying to get a feel for what to expect and just in general things that I discovered during this process let's start out with the worst case scenario and for that I use my usual test with God of War I running at two times native resolution with the high performance mode and the smart fan setting I have the device itself set to 50% brightness and volume with the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on God of War II came in at under 2 hours of battery life which really surprised me but battery results definitely improve from here on out so let's take it down one level and test out performance mode with a smart fan setting and at 50% brightness and volume with the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth still turned on we came in with a little improvement with 2 and 1/2 hours of gameplay God of War for this was set to Native resolution and is definitely a demanding game even at Native resolution so let's now try out God of War II with just did standard performance mode with the fan turned off at Native resolution to scale down some of the requirements needed for the game this is where things got interesting I noticed not too long in that the device started to Thermal throttle so I decided to stop this test since really if we're not able to run God of War II and a resolution with standard performance and the fan turned off then there isn't much to test here naturally I decided to do the test again with standard performance but this time with the Quiet fan setting turned on to help with thermals the pocket 4 pro at 50% brightness and volume with the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on and God of War at Native resolution the 4 Pro hit a little more than 3 hours and 45 minutes so I wanted to do a test without the Fanon and because we know that my usual God of War I was a bit too much for the 4 Pro on the thermal side I went with God of War chains of Olympus on the PlayStation Portable using PPSSPP and here I have the pocket 4 Pro Set again to 50% brightness and volume with the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on using the standard performance mode with the no fan option I actually went with four times native resolution here which makes the game look great and the 4 Pro did really well with this test hitting over 5 hours of gameplay and no throttling observed during this test now for my lightest test as usual I use the Yoshi's Island for Super Nintendo and I have set the 4 Pro to use the standard performance mode with the fan off as well as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned off at 50% brightness and volume the 4 Pro managed a little over 12 and 1/2 hours with osi's Island for this lighter test which isn't the best I've seen on the channel but in reality is a very solid amount of play time and more than anyone will need in one city let's talk about these service temperatures now we know that the device can definitely reach a point where it throttles performance at least as we saw in God of War II so let's go ahead and use that as our first test the 4 Pro is set to standard performance with the fan turned off Surface temperatures at the front hovered in the 30s range with the highest numbers at the center where the display is maxing out at around 38° C on the left side where the d-pad and analog stick are temperatures were a little warmer than I'd like to see staying at around that mid-30s range on the right side where the face buttons are it was much cooler at around 28° C on the back side of the face buttons temperatures were around that same Ark staying pretty cool likewise the backside were the d-pad stayed around that mid-30s range and again the middle was the hottest that I recorded at about 41 to 42° which is under stimul given this is where the intake vent is now let's turn this fan back on and I set it to sport mode to see how well this fan moves hot air away from the 4 Pro I left this alone for a few minutes and then recorded new numbers the fan definitely has improved surface temperatures here on the right side temperatures remain the same but improvements start to be seen towards the middle and then especially on the left it does look like we dropped a few degrees here and on the back it's the same story with numbers lower overall but most impressive is the drop in the center around the vent dropping almost as much as 10° C definitely an improvement and it does show the effectiveness of the active cooing now in my early look I did mention the fan is pretty audible on that smart mode setting and it can be as well when using the smart option I talked about how I hope that retroid would either adjust the fan curves or just give us the option to do it ourselves the recent update that corrected the screen issue included some adjustments to the fan curve but honestly I haven't really noticed a difference and the fan is still audible especially on that sport mode setting and worth mentioning again here I do hope that retroid will continue to roll out updates and eventually give us the option to set our own curves so is the 4 Pro a worthy upgrade from the 3 plus yes I think that the 4 Pro brings a a lot to the table and improves on the 3 plus in almost every way the jump in performance from the 3 plus with the t618 to the dimensity 1100 in the 4 Pro is fairly substantial not only on paper but also in terms of real world performance we are seeing better performance across the board for all the games that would run on the 3+ for example Untitled Goose game was a switch game that I remember working with the 3+ but just didn't quite have the grunt to run it at full speed but now with the 4 Pro it's running closer to that 60 frames per second target Target and at a higher resolution setting this is true for many other games that I've tested across various emulators and even for Native Android gaming but there are games that simply wouldn't run or work on the 3 plus that are now playable on the 4 Pro and so the playable library of games expand with the arrival of the 4 Pro the arrival of the 4 Pro also means that we now have a new standard at that $199 price point the 4 Pro brings more performance than other competitors at or near this price point such as the Odin light and pro it's exciting to see this level of performance in a device with this form factor and while devices like the Odin Pro enl certainly have a place in the market I do think that the pocket 4 pro at 1999 is a big deal now I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Odin 2 which at its starting price of $299 is an absolute Game Changer however for some the amount of performance that the 4 Pro brings at $199 will be more than enough and some might find that the extra $100 isn't warranted but the re realityy is that we can keep going up in price and then with another $100 you're at the steamex territory the beautiful thing today is that we do have so many options for various use cases at various price points and at the end of the day the 4 Pro serves a specific audience that I think will greatly enjoy the device and so I do think that the 4 pro has now set a new standard at this price point and I'm excited to see how others respond to this this has been an absolute doozy of a video and I sincerely thank you for sticking around to the end let me know down in the comments what you think about the 4 Pro and has yours arrived already or are you planning on getting one as always I am the Retro Tech dad and thank you so much for [Music] watching
