Saturday, March 23rd 2024
Qualcomm Believes that Most Windows Games Will Run on Snapdragon X Elite
Qualcomm's "Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games" GDC presentation attracted a low number of attendees according to The Verge's Sean Hollister (senior editor). The semiconductor firm is readying its Snapdragon X Elite mobile chipset family for launch around mid-2024—prototypes and reference devices have been popping up lately. Leaked Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge specs suggest that Qualcomm's ARM-based solution is ready to take on Apple's M3 chipset series. Gaming is not a major priority for many owners of slimline notebooks, but Apple has made efforts to unleash some of its silicon's full potential in that area. Snapdragon Studios' GDC showcase outlined a promising future for their X Elite chips—according to Hollister's coverage of the GDC session, Qualcomm's principal engineer told "game developers (that) their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops—no porting required."
Issam Khalil's presentation covered three different porting paths: x64 emulation, ARM64, and a hybrid approach (via an "ARM64EC" driver). He demonstrated tools that will be available for games developers to start enabling titles on Windows + Snapdragon platforms. The Snapdragon X Elite is capable of running x86/64 games at "close to full speed" via emulation, as claimed in presentation slides. Khalil posits that developers are not required to change the code or assets of their games to achieve full speed performance. Adreno GPU drivers have been prepped for DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL—mapping layers were utilized to grant support for DX9 and OpenGL (up to v4.6). Specific titles were not highlighted as fully operational on Snapdragon X Elite-based devices, but the team has spent time combing through "top games" on Steam.
Sources:
The Verge, Wccftech, Beebom
Issam Khalil's presentation covered three different porting paths: x64 emulation, ARM64, and a hybrid approach (via an "ARM64EC" driver). He demonstrated tools that will be available for games developers to start enabling titles on Windows + Snapdragon platforms. The Snapdragon X Elite is capable of running x86/64 games at "close to full speed" via emulation, as claimed in presentation slides. Khalil posits that developers are not required to change the code or assets of their games to achieve full speed performance. Adreno GPU drivers have been prepped for DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL—mapping layers were utilized to grant support for DX9 and OpenGL (up to v4.6). Specific titles were not highlighted as fully operational on Snapdragon X Elite-based devices, but the team has spent time combing through "top games" on Steam.
35 Comments on Qualcomm Believes that Most Windows Games Will Run on Snapdragon X Elite
Translation: Qually is too lazy to do extensive testing on them, so once again, consumers get to be their (unpaid) guinea pigs....They're just expecting folks to invest in the platform without ANY guarantees whatsoever that their favorite gamz will run on it... yee haw, sure sounds like a beta-tester crapfest IMHO....
Also, as we all know, emulation suks wallah in most cases, although IIRC, the fruity bois made it work pretty well on their walled-garden OS & hdwr at one time, perhaps it still does, but gammin is/was never really much of a priority for them anyways :)
I'd be surprised if a company admitted "No, our product won't run anything other than the browser and office suite"
Probably not well? Even RDNA2/3 suck with some old games I've tried on Windows (but somehow work under Proton/Wine in linux, lol).
ARM won't escape physics
But will it be worth it, if it costs about £1700 like Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 running Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen3?
Honestly, rife cheating mixed with terrible, ineffective anti-cheat that seems to have more false-positives than actual effective purpose is one of the major reasons I've stopped playing competitive FPS games online.
You know full well only fortnite matters :laugh:
'Qualcomm Believes that Most Windows Games Will Run like shhh , if they run at all on Snapdragon X Elite'
I just don't understand this ARM on the desktop race. It's more expensive than low-end alternatives from both AMD and Intel, non-upgradeable and slow. It's either emulated x86/AMD64, which is dog slow, or uses Windows compiled to be native ARM, which is buggy, slow and VERY incompatible.
I just don't get peoples thinking on this. Even nGreedias newest and most expensive ARM servers offer no positives over an AMD server. So do people think they are going to get the equivalent of a PS5, running Windows 11, playing every game they throw at it at 60fps for half its price? Is that it?
some casual gaming should be doable but for the high end we will be stuck with intel amd and nvidia for quite some time.
I would be happy if i could get something that does what the m series chips do for content creation but doesn't come with the apple tax and other idiosyncrasies