A Few Thoughts on Portable PC Gaming (Premium)

In the early 1990s, the PC became inevitable as a platform thanks to several unrelated advances. The biggest, of course, was Windows. After struggling to gain traction with an inept series of initial releases, Microsoft delivered a surprisingly capable Windows 3.0 that arrived to rave reviews and triggered a massive adoption wave that continued for the entire decade.

This was a big deal for me as well, but the inevitability of my own shift to the PC was tied to two other events: A decision to go back to school to learn software development. And then the arrival of Id Software’s Castle Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, which upended my understanding of what was even possible. My fate was sealed.

Castle Wolfenstein 3D was nothing less than a wake-up call. Despite a sophisticated multiprocessor architecture optimized for videogames, my beloved Amiga 500 of that time was incapable of playing this new type of game, what we now call a first-person shooter, let alone at the performance Id Software somehow summoned from the lowly x86 architecture. This game was so highly optimized, so well-made, that it ran full-speed on my wife’s underpowered 286-based IBM PS/1. It seemed impossible at the time. It still does, thinking back on it.

Id racked up a series of wins in the 1990s, most notably the tent pole releases, in turn, of Doom, Doom II, Quake, and Quake II. But the market was also quickly flooded with a stable of capable rivals like Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, Unreal, and many others. By the end of the 1990s, I was very firmly in the PC camp, not just with Windows for productivity work, but with gaming as well. As a card-carrying member of the first generation who grew up with what we now call videogame consoles—the Atari 2600, Odyssey 2, Intellivision, and ColecoVision, among others—I had, like so many others, moved on. The PC has become everything. It was essential.

I tell the story of the history of Windows from a technical perspective in my book Windows Everywhere, and the central theme is that Microsoft successfully weathered several major technology shifts over two decades by adapting this platform to address each change. This worked so well, the company got caught up in antitrust troubles on three continents, triggering a lost decade in which other companies finally usurped Microsoft’s dominance via new web and then mobile platforms. Today, personal computing is more heterogeneous than it was during the heyday of Windows in the 1990s. And as those changes occurred, we found ourselves engaging in fewer tasks on the PC as we collectively started using different hardware, software, and services.

This is well understood: Far more people spend far more time using smartphones and other mobile devices than is the case with PCs today. But one might view the resurgence of console gaming at the dawn of the 21st century, starting with the Sony PlayStation 2 in 2000, timed perfectly to Microsoft’s influential nadir, as the earliest hint of what was to come. Microsoft had, by that point, already brought first-class gaming capabilities to Windows, first with WinG, and then with DirectX, amplifying the shift away from MS-DOS. But these console makers—Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, at the time—represented a troubling threat to its dominance.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft tried to counter this threat with its own platform, a Windows-based platform, starting first with a little-remembered partnership with Sega and its Dreamcast console. And then more openly and explicitly with Xbox—the “DirectX box”—a console that took the DirectX gaming strata from Windows and put it in a standalone device. Embrace and extend.

The first Xbox was fascinating on many levels, but it was basically just a PC with good graphics running a stripped-down version of Windows. I got one immediately. As a savant of sorts with the precise mouse and keyboard control mechanism required by PC games, I struggled with the controller and never felt entirely comfortable using it. But this generation of consoles was the start of a shift in which sophisticated 3D first-person shooters would become not just possible but viable on non-PCs. Titles like Goldeneye, Halo: Combat Evolved, and many others proved that consoles could do it all.

Though I was an immediate Halo fan, this shift didn’t click with me until the Xbox 360 arrived in 2005. This console launched with a slate of terrific titles, including some great first-person shooters like Call of Duty 2, a continuation of a game series that started with Medal of Honor and then the original Call of Duty, titles I had enjoyed quite a bit on the PC. This and subsequent Call of Duty games would go on to dominate my time for almost 20 years, after some temporary dalliances with the next few Halo titles and a few others. But with the Xbox 360, I was hooked: From that moment, I played games exclusively on Xbox, and I owned every subsequent version of the console. It was, if you will, game over.

Until it wasn’t.

In focusing so heavily on Xbox, Microsoft lost site of the importance of PC gaming repeatedly through the next decade and a half. It made a half-hearted attempt to meld the PC gaming and Xbox worlds in 2006 with Games for Windows Live, but that petered out quickly. And then it delivered a more heartfelt return with Windows 10, thanks to a series of strategy shifts that included Xbox becoming Microsoft’s umbrella brand for entertainment.

The changes that arrived first in Windows 10 were meaningful, and this time, they continued forward. Microsoft improved Windows to make games behave better, and it worked to integrate the system with Xbox, the platform, and a small but growing selection of console-first titles. Granted, as an Xbox console fan, I was initially uninterested for the most part. But as the 2000s turned into the 2010s and then into the 2020s, I grew increasingly unhappy with my Call of Duty focus. Or what was perhaps more honestly called my Call of Duty addiction. It was unhealthy.

On March 2, 2023, after packing for that day’s flight to Mexico City, I noodled around with some Cal of Duty multiplayer, as I did, and then I turned off the Xbox Series S and left for the airport. While we were away, I didn’t play videogames, as is usually the case for me on trips, regardless of the length. This got me thinking: If I could ignore videogames for days or weeks at a time when I was away, maybe I could do the same when I was home. And as a test of my ability to say no, that’s what I did. Days turned into weeks turned into a month. And then, three months later, it occurred that I had crossed some threshold. Perhaps I had cured myself of this Call of Duty addiction.

But I do like videogames, and I do believe, strongly, that one can have a healthy relationship with videogames. And so I experimented again. Playing games, less often, and not Call of Duty. To make this less convenient, less seamless, I started looking at what games I might play through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on the PC. The bigger shift here was moving past the dual display experience I had had for many, many years in my home office, where I worked on my PC using one display and gamed on an Xbox on another, to the side. By removing the Xbox and the second display from the equation, I would have to give up working to play, as I couldn’t access Windows normally and respond to events as they occurred out in the world. This, I felt, would help limit the time I spent gaming.

This worked, but some of my early game choices—the middling Halo Infinite being the poster child here—helped, too: I joked that anyone battling a videogame addiction should just play Halo Infinite, as this game is so uninteresting, it will solve the problem handily.

But that strategy worked, perhaps too well: As three months turned into six, I realized I barely ever thought about videogames. And so I gave up on Halo Infinite (like most do, I imagine) and turned to some proven titles from the past, replaying some classics to renew my love of the thing. This worked nicely, and with classics like Quake II and Half-Life being remastered, a broader general interest in retro computing and gaming, and new books like John Romero’s Doom Guy all piquing my interest, my year without videogames quickly transformed into a transition back to a healthier relationship with games. Not by design, per se, but all happening on the PC.

I expected Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October 2023 to impact this shift in a major way. But as you all know, to date, this expensive transaction has resulted in just two games, Diablo IV and 2023’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, coming to Xbox Game Pass. (The next Call of Duty title, Black Ops 6, is coming to the service in late October.) That rankles me on so many levels, as does Microsoft’s continued silence about this weird omission. But I’ve made do. As it turns out, there are still plenty of great games on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate/PC Game Pass. More to the point, this is the PC. And that means choice.

As anyone who plays games on the PC knows, there are multiple online stores and ecosystems that serve this lucrative market, and I have a foot in some of them. The biggest, of course, is Steam. And despite my Xbox-centricity over the previous decades, I have a pretty health library of PC games on that service, including Black Mesa (and amazing OG Half-Life remake), Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Destiny 2, Half-Life 2 (and all the add-on episodes and other content), and over 35 other games. Steam has been a big part of my PC gaming experience this year. In recent weeks, I’ve played a ton of Doom (2016), but also Borderlands 3 and Doom Eternal, all of which I intend to finish to completion (single player). I also grabbed Control for my Snapdragon X tests and will look at that again.

I also joined the Epic Game Store many years ago and routinely review the free games it routinely gives away, adding the ones I think I’ll like to my library just in case. This has paid off, obviously: I have a wide range of titles in my Epic Games library that includes The Evil Within, Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition, Dying Light Enhanced Edition, Bioshock: The Collection, Wolfenstein: The New Order, all three most recent Tomb Raider titles, INSIDE, Alien Isolation, and so many more. My oldest title, from 2017, is the original Unreal Tournament, a classic.

Speaking of classics, my other big source of PC games is GOG.com, formerly called Good Old Gamers. I’ve purchased several titles from GOG over the years, all classics of yesteryear: DOOM I Enhanced, DOOM II Enhanced, Ultimate DOOM, Final DOOM, Unreal Gold, Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition, Far Cry, and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault War Chest key among them. Recently, the service started selling the original PlayStation version of Resident Evil­—with similar re-releases of the OG Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 coming soon—so I bought that, as I had never owned the original PlayStation and didn’t start playing RE until fairly late in the, um, game. (Modern remakes of the first three RE titles are available now in Xbox Game Pass across console and PC, too, as are more recent games in the series like Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, which I finished.)

None of this is news to those who’ve stuck with PC gaming over the years or have always preferred PCs to consoles. And even though I chose the console path, I was obviously aware of all this as time went by and even experimented here and there on the PC. But this personal shift back to PC gaming is, if coincidental, nicely timed. There are some interesting things happening with PC gaming—or perhaps just PCs and gaming, if you will—this year.

That broader industry shift probably started with AMD, but because there are so few AMD-based PCs available to me for review, I’m not as familiar with what’s happening on that side of the x64 fence. My apologies if you’re an AMD fan: I’ve had nothing but good luck with the few recent generation AMD-based PCs I’ve used—last year’s HP Dragonfly Pro is still one of my very favorite laptops—and I wish I had more experience with them.

But when Intel launched its first Core Ultra (“Meteor Lake”) chips in late 2023, I was interested in the new Arm-influenced hybrid architecture (which I now believe has contributed to reliability and battery life issues), its integrated NPU (which we now know to be relatively weak), and the new Arc integrated graphics that Intel said would offer significant performance improvements when compared to previous generation Xe graphics.

That upgraded Arc GPU is only available in the H-series Core Ultra chips—the U-series chips make do with the old Xe graphics—but the first Meteor Lake PC I got in for review, an HP Spectre x360 14, had an H-series Intel Core Ultra processor. It also lacked the optional dedicated Nvidia graphics upgrade, which gave me an opportunity to see the progress Intel had made with graphics.

Could it play games?

I tried a handful of games, and while the results were mixed—a relatively modern shooter like Dead Space was unplayable—this was an interesting glimpse at a future I hadn’t seen coming. And Black Mesa and Rise of the Tomb Raider, which, granted, don’t stress a PC in the way a new AAA title would, looked and played great. As I wrote in the review, this thin and light computer, which one would normally consider solely for standard productivity work, represented a new tier for low-end PC gaming on the go. Suddenly, it seemed like PC gaming on mainstream thin and light laptops—what we might have called Ultrabooks back in the day—was possible.

Obviously, there are laptops with dedicated graphics as well, and those can be more amenable for those seeking to play PC games. But the future I was seeing was one that was primarily about not compromising on thinness, weight, portability, battery life, and so on, while adding this new capability that had previously been unavailable, for the most part, to owners of those PCs. Most of us don’t buy a laptop primarily to play games. But what if the laptop we were already going to buy for productivity purposes could play games too? This was suddenly an exciting possibility, albeit not fully realized by Meteor Lake.

In June, Qualcomm, Microsoft, and their PC maker partners launched the Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PC platform running Windows 11 on Arm. Heading into this time, no one was worrying about whether these PCs would play games: Just running normal x64 Windows apps had proven challenging to previous-generation Snapdragon-based PCs, and so the focus was elsewhere.

In March, Qualcomm made its first attempt at changing the narrative when it said that most x64 PC games—i.e., most PC games—would “just work” on Snapdragon X Elite-based PCs thanks to the new Prism emulator and its hardware advances. This seemed fanciful, but when Qualcomm started previewing these new chips with the press in April, I was surprised to let loose on prototype laptops where I could experience various on-device AI workloads and, go figure, several PC games—Baldur’s Gate, Control, and Redout—all of which were x65 (not Arm) native and had been acquired from the Epic Game Store. Each ran flawlessly.

This, too, was a glimpse at a future of new possibilities, though my subsequent experiences playing games—which often amounted to just trying to play games—on shipping Snapdragon X-based PCs proved a lot less successful. That this was possible at all is a miracle—these PCs aren’t just thin and light, they’re running an alien architecture that has to emulate these games—but looking back on this today, I can see the problem. The magic of Windows 11 on Arm on Snapdragon X is how reliable and effortless its best attributes—performance, efficiency, battery life, instant-on—are. The problem with playing games on this platform is that it’s not reliable at all. It requires too much effort.

This may change: Qualcomm, in particular, seems confident that compatibility and performance will only improve across an ever-bigger range of titles. And Microsoft has certainly done the platform-level work needed in Windows 11 on Arm to makes this experience for successful. For now, however, this is no reason to choose a Snapdragon X-based PC. But it is, like Meteor Lake, a sign that things are changing. The dream is still alive.

In personal computing, we’re always looking to the Next Big Thing to solve our problems. And in this space, the Next Big Thing is a coming generation of new PC-based processors from Intel and AMD that could finally put gaming on thin and light laptops over the top. Intel has announced that its “Lunar Lake” processors—the second generation Core Ultra chips that will replace Meteor Lake later this year–are yet another major advance, and in particular with graphics, which it promises could offer up to twice the performance we see in Meteor Lake. Interesting. And AMD recently announced that its next-generation Zen5-based processors would begin shipping in late July. The desktop variants were just delayed by a few weeks, but the mobile Ryzen AI 300 series mobile chips are still no track.

I am curious about AMD.

As noted, I’ve not spent as much time with AMD-based laptops as I’d like. But in an interesting coincidence, Lenovo recently reached out to me to see whether I’d be interested in reviewing a few more PCs, one of which is built around an AMD Ryzen 7 chip. Even though I had five Lenovo PCs in-house at the time, and was overdue returning at least three of them to the company, I couldn’t say no. I had to know.

I will be writing more formally about this PC soon. But for the curious, it’s a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 2-in-1 with an AMD Ryzen 7 8845H processor, Radeon 780M graphics, 16 GB of RAM, a 1 TB SSD, and a 14-inch IPS display at 3840 x 2400. Here’s: This laptop has a starting price of just $600 as I write this, though I don’t see the higher-res display or Radeon 780M graphics options, so the as-tested price is unclear. But this thing can play games. Quite well, in fact.

To be clear, it’s not the thin, light Ultrabook-like experience I value so highly and enjoy with the (much more expensive) Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PCs I’ve been focused on lately; it weighs 3.3 pounds and feels dense and heavy for its size, and it’s about 0.70 inches thick. And the fans come on like little jet engines when playing games. But. It. Can. Play. Games.

As noted above, I’ve played a lot of Doom (2016) lately. Steam tells me I’ve played this game for almost 12 hours during the past month. Not anywhere close to my old Call of Duty numbers, but notable these days. I’ve played this game on several different PCs, including at least three of the Copilot+ PCs I currently have on-hand for testing. And the best results I’ve seen to date, by far, have been with the beefy 16-inch Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 I reviewed a few months back. That system delivers a high-end Intel Core Ultra 9-series processor and dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX Laptop graphics, and it costs about $2000.

The IdeaPad 5, a relative baby by comparison, runs Doom just as well. By which I mean Full HD+ resolution, V-sync on, most graphics settings at Ultra, and at a consistent 60 FPS. This was impressive to me, surprising. And so I tried a few more titles. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, which I had started playing on that Yoga Pro 9i (I’m over 4 hours in) and intend to finish, and then Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, which landed on Game Pass yesterday.

I can’t get Senua’s Saga to run reliably, it keeps hanging. But the new Call of Duty game, which I installed mostly to see what that looked like, looks and performs beautifully in single player, better than I had expected. It’s running at 1920 x 1200 at 60 FPS with V-sync on, using AMD FSR upscaling and a range of graphics quality (from low to max) across many settings. It looks terrific and it performs perfectly well.

So what’s the point?

We’re on the cusp of something special, I think. But those who don’t mind giving up a bit in the way of size and weight—and most certainly battery life, though I’ve not tested that yet—already have options if game playing on-the-go is a priority. This speaks to the central advantage of Windows PCs, when you think about it: We have such great choices, and so many of them. And even today, before this next generation of chips arrives, anyone who wants to play games of whatever kind, at whatever level, on a laptop can do so. And often without breaking the bank.

If you care at all about PCs and videogames, it’s a wonderful time to be alive. But it’s about to get a lot better.