Can Snapdragon X Elite finally make Windows on Arm a gaming champ? Qualcomm thinks so

[zohaibahd]

Highly anticipated: Intel and AMD have dominated the Windows gaming landscape for decades, but Qualcomm is looking to shake things up with its latest Arm-based processor. At the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC), the company made some eyebrow-raising claims about the gaming capabilities of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops.

According to Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil, most existing x86 Windows games should "just work" on the Snapdragon X Elite without any porting required. That's a significant development as it would greatly expand the gaming potential for Windows laptops powered by Qualcomm's Arm chips right from the start.

Khalil outlined three options for developers seeking to get their games running on the Snapdragon X Elite: a full native Arm64 port, creating hybrid apps that blend native and emulated code, or... doing almost nothing and allowing the games to run through emulation. It's this last "just works" scenario that excites us.

Qualcomm claims the key lies in the fact that modern games are more GPU bound than CPU bound. With the Snapdragon X Elite boasting a powerful Adreno GPU, the company asserts that graphics performance will remain unaffected when emulating x86 code on its Arm CPU cores. If this holds true, overall game performance would primarily depend on the capabilities of the Adreno GPU.

To pull this off, Qualcomm has even integrated support for DirectX 9 through 12, Vulkan, OpenGL up to 4.6, and even OpenCL into its drivers and software stack. Apparently, it has extensively tested all the top games on Steam to validate its claims.

Of course, there are some caveats here. Games with kernel-level anti-cheat likely won't work, nor will titles that require AVX instruction sets. But the potential upside is tantalizing - Windows for Arm laptops that can properly game without the massive overhead of x86 emulation.

It's not unprecedented for an Arm vendor to claim solid x86 emulation prowess. Apple gave us a glimpse of this potential with its Rosetta 2 translation layer for Arm Macs. However, the company controls its entire hardware and software stack, making optimizations easier.

Still, Qualcomm did claim late last year that the Snapdragon X Elite SoC is faster than Apple's M3. This should hopefully offset any optimization issues when running games for comparable performance to Apple's silicon.

Whether Qualcomm can deliver on these promises for the more fragmented world of Windows gaming remains to be seen. But with Snapdragon X Elite systems slated for release this summer, including potentially new Surface devices sporting these chips, we'll get real-world answers sooner rather than later.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/102366-can-snapdragon-x-elite-finally-make-windows-arm.html

 

[Kn0xx]

Wasn't ARM a branch owned by Intel, and Intel sold them because it was "useless" tech ? ...

 

[Dreadcthulhu]

Wasn't ARM a branch owned by Intel, and Intel sold them because it was "useless" tech ? ...

No; ARM was created by Acorn Computers, a British computer company; originally ARM stood for "Acorn Risc Machine". Later on Acorn spun of its CPU design team into a company call "Advanced Risc Machines" or Arm LTD.

 

[biffzinker]

Wasn't ARM a branch owned by Intel, and Intel sold them because it was "useless" tech ? ...

Intel inherited a ARM architecture design from Digital then later sold it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM

ARM licenses out the ISA to build your own design (Apple Inc.) or ready made SoC's. A company that goes with a ready made design just needs to find a foundry to fabricate the chips.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I look forward to this, if its true. The battery life of the Snapdragon powered lenovo laptops is extraordinary. That being said, I'd also like to see proper linux support this time around, not all of us carry nadella's tracker OS on our devices

 

[Kn0xx]

No; ARM was created by Acorn Computers, a British computer company; originally ARM stood for "Acorn Risc Machine". Later on Acorn spun of its CPU design team into a company call "Advanced Risc Machines" or Arm LTD.

Your right. Intel had XScale ARM Chipset branch, and they sold it to dedicate efforts in Atom architecture and x86 for mobile. That wasn't a smart move from Intel.

 

[Dimitriid]

On Windows they might be right but there's a lot more than just games to worry about and port over.

Meanwhile if they would consider investing their efforts on Linux instead, everything they said about CPU performance mostly not impacting gaming would still be true in Linux and we know a ton more software is already ARM native in Linux so direct support from them could actually make things more viable.

 

[daffy duck]

Don't give a toss about gaming, let us see how it handles real productivity workloads and how well the battery last at 80W. I'll bet Windows Surface laptops using this SoC will be dearer than even Macbook Pros.

 

[toooooot]

Does it not mean every game will have to be individually made compatible for this cpu? if so, then no, it wont be very popular unless it is dirty cheap, and I know for a fact it wont be

 

[rmcrys]

Does it not mean every game will have to be individually made compatible for this cpu? if so, then no, it wont be very popular unless it is dirty cheap, and I know for a fact it wont be

Search x86 on ARM

 

[VariableSpike]

We'll see, qualcomm has blown a lot of smoke like this before with things like the 8cx, which didn't pan out to much, and of course there is always the reminder that you don't tend to get much power efficiency advantage once you start pushing these SOC's (and while they probably support Vulkan pretty well, I'm really wondering what the state of their driver stack and design is with directx, since the adrenos are of course mobile gpu's...)