Emulation proves the inevitable Achilles' Heel of Qualcomm's new PC chips when it comes to gaming

Two weeks ago I was in a hotel in downtown Taipei prodding some of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite laptops, and I was impressed with how well they ran Baldur's Gate 3 and Metro Exodus. Both are compiled for the x86 CPU architecture, yet the co-created Microsoft/Qualcomm Prism emulation layer still delivered impressive gaming performance from proper PC games.

And I was happy. A few days later I was happier still as I checked out the Works on WoA microsite to see about game compatibility and this is what I saw:

But today, now that the early reviews are starting to trickle out—either in sponsored form or otherwise—the news isn't nearly so promising. And it's nothing to do with the brutal bout of Computex showvid-19 I came back with; it's all about the performance hit when it comes to gaming under that emulation layer. 

Dave2D's video offers up some okay benchmark figures at the 1080p Low preset level on a selection of games but goes on to highlight that «there's also occasional stutter in the games. I don't think it's stutter from a hardware thing, I'm convinced it's completely a software issue. Because the thermals were fine—and sometimes you'd go for a long stretch with a sustained frame rate—but eventually you get a stutter.»

Even the sponsored Matthew Moniz video about the X Elite-powered Asus Vivobook S 15—paid for by Asus—notes that gaming is the real weak point of the Qualcomm chips. Fortnite refuses to load (which I believe is an EAC issue from talking to some Qualcomm folk around Computex) and they highlight Diablo 4 running fine for around a minute or so before suffering a catastrophic Prism crash.

Overwatch will work, but is seemingly locked to 1280 x 1080 and regularly stutters because «it feels like it's translating on the fly.» Moniz goes on to state that this is the real issue with the ARM-based chips. «No matter what game you play on this, if it's been optimised for x86, you're going to take a performance hit… Now, if you're playing an Arm game, like