Mar 22, 2024 - 12:59
By pcgamer.com

Qualcomm claims Windows games 'just work' on its new Arm laptop chip

Qualcomm claims that most games created for x86 Windows «just work» on its new killer Arm chip, the Snapdragon X Elite. There's no porting required.

If that's true, it's quite an achievement, albeit not totally unprecedented. Apple pulled off something similar with its jump from x86 to own in-house Arm silicon via the Rosetta 2 translation layer.

The thing is, Apple controls the entire software-through-hardware stack and is said to have built features into its silicon expressly to minimise the performance hit of running x86 software on Arm CPUs.

Moreover, if there's one application type where Apple's x86 emulation is a bit patchy, it's games. Legacy x86 titles do generally run on Apple silicon, but the performance is much more hit and miss than other applications. But then you can say the same for games coded natively for Apple platforms since forever.

Anyway, Qualcomm's claims came at the recent GDC or Games Developer Conference (via The Verge), in a session titled: «Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games.» Attending game devs were told they have three options for running their existing Windows titles on the new Qualcomm chip in Arm for Windows.

Qualcomm's key point is that most games are GPU rather than CPU bottlenecked and claims that GPU performance is unaffected by emulation. If that's correct, game performance will mostly be a function of the Snapdragon X Elite's Adreno GPU.

Speaking of which, Qualcomm has been showing off the new chip this week and some new benchmark data has emerged. For now, it's not fully independent review data, but it does provide some insight.

So, for the record Qualcomm claims that Snapdragon X Elite hits 39 fps in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme. That compares to 33 fps for the new Intel Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake chip. Apple's M3 with its big boi new GPU does 48 fps in the same test.

Notably, Qualcomm didn't include AMD in its