My phone is dying

I’m using a Motorola Moto G54 5G, and over the past few days I’ve suddenly started having serious performance problems with emulation.

Until recently, my phone was running my emulators perfectly fine. I regularly play SNES, PS1 and PSP games, and I’ve never had this particular problem before. Now, seemingly out of nowhere, the games will initially run perfectly, but after some time the audio suddenly starts stuttering, crackling or slowing down. Sometimes the game itself seems to become less responsive as well.

The strange part is that if I minimize the emulator and then open it again, the problem immediately goes away. I don’t even have to restart the phone or change any settings. I can simply leave the game, return to it, and everything is normal again — at least for a while.

At first I thought this might have something to do with RetroAchievements, because I mainly use RetroArch and DuckStation with RetroAchievements enabled. However, I already tested with RetroAchievements completely disabled, and the exact same problem still happens.

It also happens with PPSSPP, which makes me even more confused. So this doesn’t seem to be an issue specific to RetroArch, DuckStation, or RetroAchievements.

I’ve also tested some other standalone emulators, and in some cases the same games run normally there, which makes it difficult for me to understand what exactly is happening.

Another thing that worries me is that the phone has recently started getting unusually hot. Sometimes I can launch a game that isn’t particularly demanding, and the phone starts heating up much more than I would expect. This is especially concerning because these same games used to run normally on this phone.

The phone has also been showing some other strange hardware-related symptoms recently. The speakerphone/hand-free audio function is no longer working properly, and when the phone gets very hot, the display sometimes starts showing strange colors or visual artifacts.

Because several different things have started going wrong around the same period, I’m beginning to wonder whether there might be an underlying hardware problem — perhaps something involving the GPU, CPU, thermal management, memory, a motherboard component, or even a driver-related issue. I honestly don’t know enough about phone hardware to identify the cause.

I’m especially confused because this is not a case of the phone simply being too weak to emulate these systems. It was already running these games perfectly before. The problem appeared recently, and now I’m getting stuttering, excessive heat, and other unusual symptoms.

I really don’t know what to do at this point. I like using this phone for gaming and emulation, including playing games with achievements, and I currently can’t afford to replace it. I’m trying to figure out whether this could still be a software, Android, emulator, driver, or thermal issue, or whether these symptoms suggest that the phone’s hardware may actually be starting to fail.

If anyone has experienced something similar with a Motorola Moto G54 5G or another MediaTek-based phone — especially sudden emulator audio stuttering combined with unusually high temperatures — I’d really appreciate any advice on how I could diagnose this.