Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite Arm SoC is capable of running Baldur's Gate 3 at 30 frames per second

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Alfonso Maruccia

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A hot potato: Qualcomm recently said its upcoming Arm SoC would provide a good gaming experience for low-power laptops. The corporation has already tested the chip with several high-profile games, including Baldur's Gate 3, the latest award-winning CRPG from Larian.

Baldur's Gate 3, the D&D role-playing game that came to dominate this year's BAFTA Games Awards and other gaming-related events, can run at "playable" frame rates on laptops equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite chip. Qualcomm is bringing its latest Arm SoC to Windows laptops this summer and is confident enough to propose the tech as a proper gaming solution to the elitism-inclined PC user base.

The US fabless chip manufacturer attended the latest Game Developers Conference to show what the Snapdragon X Elite can do for gaming. Qualcomm claimed the Arm chip is faster than Apple's M3 platform and provides developers with new approaches to bringing their games to the platform.

Studios can easily port titles designed to run on Windows x86 PCs to the Snapdragon X Elite's native ARM64 ISA for the best performance and power usage levels. Alternatively, developers can create "hybrid" ARM64EC applications for near-native performance. In the worst-case scenario, a game could run on the Arm SoC through x64 emulation and still work fine.

Qualcomm will offer native drivers for its Adreno GPU to run DirectX 11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL games. The company will even support older DirectX 9 and OpenGL 4.6 titles through the D3D9On12 mapping layer. Qualcomm claims that games are now heavily bottlenecked by the GPU anyway, so the CPU performance hit experienced with the transition from x64 to ARM64 should not be concerning.

The corporation tested its Snapdragon X Elite laptop prototypes with several modern games, including Control, Redout II, and Baldur's Gate 3. Larian's RPG was recently shown running on one of those prototypes by "Snapdragon insider" Devin Arthur, who saw a demo of Baldur's Gate 3 running at 1080p and 30fps, which, in his opinion, is a "perfectly playable" frame rate.

Most passionate PC gamers spend significant amounts on the latest hardware upgrades to keep their frame rates improving. The 30fps debate is one of the most trite arguments plaguing the PC gaming community. Expecting this level of performance for Baldur's Gate 3 on a brand new Arm "PC" will likely add even more fuel to the argument.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/102416-qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-arm-chip-can-run.html

 
Is it a demanding scene? Is there a comparison for more-like chips?
I guess the main thing right now is if it's consistent at that FPS.

As for the "30FPS is unplayable in any game" hyperbole, I just see those types of people as the "graphics before gameplay" type of person. Who cares what that loud minority thinks lol

Most games are fine at that FPS, especially when you don't have a thousands of dollars PC or a Console (beggars can't be choosers). Competitive, however, I wouldn't want to run at such a low FPS in this day and age though.
 
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Sure, 30 fps for a static game like bg3 is playable. But we have no idea what quality settings were used. I would consider this as really promising development and signs of more options in future, but current use would be really limited. This could be great in systems like Steam Deck as I presume it would provide easily 60fps on 800p screen, but at cost of compatibility with all other titles.
 
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Not for fast past games, but there are certain games where I think 30fps is "perfectly playable"

BG3 is one of them, city builders would be fine, anything turn based. Also, I think people forget that frame consistency plays a role. If you can get a stable 30 fps, depending on the game, it can feel netter than 60fps with 30fps dips. So there are cases where you're better off capping it at 30 instead of letting it do whatever you want. I remember cyberpunk being like this because when it came out, I still had my 1800x with 6700xt. I would get 70-80fps with dips down into the 30s. Let's call them 10% lows. Before I upgraded, cyberpunk felt better capped at 30fps than It did letting the FPS do whatever it wanted.
 
yRaz said:
Not for fast past games, but there are certain games where I think 30fps is "perfectly playable"

BG3 is one of them, city builders would be fine, anything turn based. Also, I think people forget that frame consistency plays a role. If you can get a stable 30 fps, depending on the game, it can feel netter than 60fps with 30fps dips. So there are cases where you're better off capping it at 30 instead of letting it do whatever you want. I remember cyberpunk being like this because when it came out, I still had my 1800x with 6700xt. I would get 70-80fps with dips down into the 30s. Let's call them 10% lows. Before I upgraded, cyberpunk felt better capped at 30fps than It did letting the FPS do whatever it wanted.
Click to expand...

To maintain a consistent 30fps, you typically need to have performance headroom beyond that threshold, which doesn't appear to be the case here.
 
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Question is of course what settings, especially as because of AMD's work and Intel getting into the laptop space, any more premium laptops with integrated graohics usually pack something that will play 1080p low okay at 30fps, never mind having FSR OR XeSS as an option, and unless this is going into sub 500 dollar budget laptops, this is what I would expect tbh
 
Bodes well for future media devices like phones , TVs, media streamers etc . Means a lot more processing , upscaling tech can be used

Imagine joysticks coming with it inside and casting to a screen . No need for a full console- feel free to patent it and make millions
 
VariableSpike said:
Question is of course what settings, especially as because of AMD's work and Intel getting into the laptop space, any more premium laptops with integrated graohics usually pack something that will play 1080p low okay at 30fps, never mind having FSR OR XeSS as an option, and unless this is going into sub 500 dollar budget laptops, this is what I would expect tbh
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Power use is a question. Yes AMD and intel have more powerful options, in the 20+w segment. If this chip is only pulling 10w and doing this, that is very promising. The ARM thinkpad is a battery monster under heavy load.
 
My question will be what power profile was it running to achieve that FPS. Baldur's Gate 3 is not a very taxing game when you compare with the big titles released in 2023. But it can be CPU limited, I believe that's in Act 3 of the game. 30 FPS without upscaling is quite decent considering the emulation required, and its about the same performance as the Z1 Extreme in the ROG Ally.
 
Theinsanegamer said:
Power use is a question. Yes AMD and intel have more powerful options, in the 20+w segment. If this chip is only pulling 10w and doing this, that is very promising. The ARM thinkpad is a battery monster under heavy load.
Click to expand...
The Snapdragon for smartphones hits 16w, the laptop version will consume 10w? Huh ?
 
30 FPS is perfectly fine for a single player game with turn based combat like BG3. You don't need fast low latency reactions. Try playing COD or Helldivers 2 at 30 FPS...
 
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