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.
Here's a demo of Baulders Gate 3 running at 1080p hovering around 30FPS, which is perfectly playable! https://t.co/ZieiHtzRlN pic.twitter.com/VvFKbUVK5J
– Devin Arthur (@Lexcyn) March 25, 2024
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.