The best Xbox 360 emulators for PC

While the Xbox 360 was initially something of a disaster — given how many units suffered the “red ring of death” — it’s now considered one of the best consoles ever made, with a lineup of classic games that are often still being played in one form or another — just look at Grand Theft Auto V. If you’d like to try out that selection for yourself, here are some of the best Xbox 360 emulators for Windows PCs, including handheld systems.

The best Xbox 360 emulators for PC

We’re not going to list too many options here, since as you’d imagine, all you need is one app that both works well and is relatively easy to use. It’s good to have fallback options however, whether for compatibility reasons or because Microsoft might threaten legal action. Remember that emulators are often in a legal gray area — all it takes is exploiting one proprietary thing for a developer to be hounded by lawyers.

We’re actually cheating a little bit here, because EmuDeck isn’t an emulator into itself. It may however be the only download you need to bother with, because it’s a one-stop shop that lets you install and manage multiple emulators from a central hub. At the moment its chosen Xbox 360 emulator is Xenia, which we cover as a separate download below. You can also install emulators for platforms like the PlayStation 2, Nintendo Switch, Sega Genesis, or original Xbox.

If there’s a catch, it’s that the Windows version of EmuDeck is still in early access as of this writing, so you’ll have to donate to the app’s Patreon fund to download it. That does get you some other early access features however, such as cloud sync with other versions of the software, including the flagship release for Steam Deck. You’ll need the Windows software if you’re playing on non-Steam handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally.

If you’re going to choose a standalone Xbox 360 emulator, Xenia is the one to go with. It’s not spectacular, but it’s known for its reliability and pretty solid performance, which is important given that emulating something like the 360 isn’t as easy as the Super Nintendo or Atari 2600. It’s helped in this by support for standards like variable refresh rates, AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling, and NVIDIA’s FSAA anti-aliasing.

There’s an official compatibility list for games, and we recommend checking this out before you get too excited. As a rule you’ll want to stick to games marked “state-playable,” since anything else is going to have technical problems that might mar your experience — if you can even run the game in the first place.

Like many emulators, Xenia is free and open-source.

We’re getting into more advanced territory with this one. CXBX Reloaded is hosted on a GitHub page, and its installation is a little more complicated, so you’ll need some tech savvy to get it up and running. On top of that it’s really geared toward the original Xbox, although you can play some Xbox 360 and Xbox One games. Like Xenia, be sure to check the emulator’s compatibility list before you begin loading anything, and try to stick to games marked “playable.”

One thing we appreciate about CXBX is that it’s updating pretty frequently. Whereas some emulators can languish most of a year without an update, if not many years, many CXBX builds are releasing weeks or even days apart. That should, hopefully, translate into ever-improving compatibility.

If CXBX requires some tech savvy, XQEMU is only for the brave. We’re including it in this list mostly for completeness’ sake, and because there aren’t many other Xbox 360 emulators out there that haven’t dwindled into obscurity. XQEMU is a low-level emulator, which means you’ll need to hunt down a variety of obscure files, including an MCPX Boot ROM image and even a formatted HDD image. 

When you do get it running, you may encounter issues with graphics and audio, assuming audio works at all. It is at least an open-source project, so if you and/or your friends have coding skills and are willing to contribute, there’s plenty of opportunity to polish things up.

It’s nowhere as advanced as Xenia, but VR Xbox 360 PC Emulator (VR for short) is at least more user-friendly than CXBR or XQEMU, so that’s worth something. It additionally supports DirectX 11 graphics rendering claimed to hit framerates of 25fps or higher with VSync enabled, which is pretty solid given the inherent performance hit of mimicking the Xbox 360.

We’d still recommend Xenia first, given that it supports newer hardware and software standards and has better update prospects. Indeed the changelog for VR shows its most recent update as adding Windows 10 support, let alone technologies like AMD or NVIDIA’s advanced upscaling. At this point even VR’s creators are pointing gamers to Xenia as an alternative. That says more than this entire section.