Qualcomm Believes that Most Windows Games Will Run on Snapdragon X Elite

[T0@st]

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.



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[bonehead123]

Qualcomm's principal engineer told "game developers (that) their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops

"should work"

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

 

[FreedomEclipse]

But will it/can it run crisis?

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Doesn't like Anti-cheat via emulation in that one slide, so you might get the joy of ban-hammer by attempting certain games that would otherwise appear supported (and probably even run). Anti-cheat tools sure can put the damper on any excitement that might develop around non-x86 Windows gaming.

 

[kondamin]

I wonder how they will do in media encoding,

 

[bonehead123]

But will it run crisis?

Maybe, but the real question is: can it run the "Can it run crysis app"

 

[Noyand]

"should work"

Translation: Qually is too lazy to do any 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

Phrasing is important. From the verge article:

While he wouldn’t name specific games that work or how many games Qualcomm has tested, he says the company’s checking out all the top games on Steam — and that doing so makes Qualcomm confident that most titles should work. [...]“As much as I would love for this to happen, I don’t think all the developers are going to wake up overnight and say we’re going to port all our stuff to Arm tomorrow,” he said.

They did test games, but that would be unrealistic and dishonest of them to say that every game is guaranteed to work. There are over 50 000 games on Steam... Everyone jumping on a new tech will always suffer the early adopters' woes, just ask intel Arc owners , early Apple Silicon owners who had a ton of plug-ins incompatible with the new arch...You should buy that kind of stuff while being aware of the implication. Early adopters are usually nerds, willing to spend money for curiosity. I doubt that most people wouldn't feel confident about buying a PC with a QUALCOMM sticker

 

[Denver]

- You opened the game, with artifacts or not, if it's running at 3fps. Then, let's say it can run.

I'd be surprised if a company admitted "No, our product won't run anything other than the browser and office suite"

 

[JohH]

That's good, I wonder how well it'll handle old game compatibility.
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).

 

[Dave65]

AMD and Intel better look out a new sheriff is coming to town... Maybe!

 

[Vayra86]

Size matters though. And SoC based GPUs aren't exactly adorned with lots of resources, or size.

ARM won't escape physics

 

[Wirko]

Size matters though. And SoC based GPUs aren't exactly adorned with lots of resources, or size.

ARM won't escape physics

Nor will they escape Intel's lawyers. QC is safe as long as it manages to fly under Intel's radar (which only detects objects that fly through x64 code dangerously fast).

 

[Vayra86]

Why Intel's lawyers?

 

[Wirko]

Why Intel's lawyers?

Because the ISA is under patent protection. At least some important SIMD extensions still are. SSE3? Not sure but it's something that Windows requires. That already brought trouble to Microsoft (and their emulation efforts) in the past.

 

[londiste]

Also, up to SSE4. Aren't a lot of games and engines/middleware using AVX these days?

 

[Shou Miko]

Maybe, but the real question is: can it run the "Can it run crysis app"

I wonder if this can play Crysis? Only gamers know that joke. -Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO

But will it be worth it, if it costs about £1700 like Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 running Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen3?

 

[FoulOnWhite]

Well i'm not gonna be no guinea pig this time (12700k/LGA1700) so i will sit back and see how this goes. Sounds a bit optimistic to me though.

 

[Guwapo77]

I saw some early benchmarks on Max Tech's YouTube channel, but I need to see how this performs in real life. The company acquired a couple designers from Apple's M chip design team, so I know they know how to squeeze out performance. This is their first go at it independent of Apple, so I am eager to see how this pans out. I will say this, they have some serious competition with Apple's Max chip, my games run pretty damn good on the platform. Now I gotta figure out how to get all my Steam games to play on the system (if that is even possible).

 

[john_]

Most Windows games will also run on a GT 710.

 

[Flyordie]

Bet AMD had fun helping Qualcomm on this project. Last time they did RISC to X86 emulation was the K6, K6-II and K6-III era.

 

[Chrispy_]

Doesn't like Anti-cheat via emulation in that one slide, so you might get the joy of ban-hammer by attempting certain games that would otherwise appear supported (and probably even run). Anti-cheat tools sure can put the damper on any excitement that might develop around non-x86 Windows gaming.

Anti-cheat can go and suck a wang. It doesn't stop cheaters but it does significantly hurt your experience in so many ways.
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.

 

[Daven]

AMD and Intel better look out a new sheriff is coming to town... Maybe!

The new sheriff came to down when the first iPhone was released in 2007. This marked the beginning of the end of x86 (Intel) dominance for internet connected devices. And for those who might respond, I will reiterate ‘end of dominance’ not the end of x86.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Someone should let Qualcomm know that this mindset is going to bring nothing but ruination to their PC endeavor? The PC gaming market is very, very different from that of Android that they're used to dealing with. We PC gamers expect regular GPU driver updates and have a critical requirement for performance. Translation layers CPU-side tend to be a no-no, although it'll do for older games: but they better have a proper driver team developing for Adreno on Windows or no one is going to touch these.

 

[ThrashZone]

But will it run crisis?

Hi,
You know full well only fortnite matters

 

[stimpy88]

Let me fix the headline to reflect reality...

'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?