Qualcomm Says Snapdragon X Elite May Just Work With Existing PC Games

Qualcomm Says Snapdragon X Elite May Just Work With Existing PC Games

While Apple introduced its ARM-powered M-series chips, the common consensus is that it’ll be perfectly fine for daily use, but gaming pretty much requires explicit support with code rewritten to support the ARM architecture. While a small number of games work on M-series SoCs, doing the same on Windows platforms would be nearly impossible given the sheer amount of games that exist up until today.

So, the only way about it is emulation – Apple has Rosetta 2, but what does Qualcomm have hidden up its sleeve? According to Qualcomm (via The Verge), its x86/64 emulation layer is good enough to run PC games at nearly its native performance. It’ll be a part of the Snapdragon X Elite SoCs coming this summer, which is expected to support most games right away, no porting required.

According to Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil, developers have three options to make games and apps work on Snapdragon laptops:

• They can port their titles to native ARM64 for the best CPU performance and power usage since Qualcomm’s scheduler can dynamically lower the CPU’s frequency that way.
• They can create a hybrid “ARM64EC” app where Windows and its libraries and Qualcomm’s drivers run natively, but the rest of the app is emulated, for “near-native” performance.
• Or, they can do next to nothing, and their game should just work anyhow — using x64 emulation.

On the subject of games, the Snapdragon’s Adreno GPU will be a new entry on the PC scene, and given Intel’s struggles at maintaining support for such a wide pool of games, it’s not exactly clear if Qualcomm has this sorted on its end. The company did say Adreno GPUs will natively support DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL, with compatibility support for DX9 and up to OpenGL 4.6.

However, there’s one big caveat – games with kernel-level anti-cheat drivers, such as Valorant (Riot Vanguard), will not work under emulation. Games utilizing AVX instruction sets will not function as well, though a code conversion should solve that.

As reported by Windows Central, some benchmark data suggests that the performance – mostly GPU bound, hence emulation’s performance penalty is unlikely a bottleneck – will be similar to AMD’s Radeon 780M housed inside its high-end mobile APUs. This should spell good news for Qualcomm when it comes to ARM adoption, so Team Red and Team Blue better get ready for the new competition.

Pokdepinion: Consider me interested. Still, I do believe that games will still be built on x86 code for now – at least until the next-gen consoles get fully transitioned to ARM-based architectures.