Windows 11 on Arm + Snapdragon X: Gaming, the Final Frontier ⭐

Over 18 months ago, I walked into a meeting room in One World Trade in New York City, nervous that what I was about to see would in some way expose the inevitable lies: Windows 11 on Arm running on Qualcomm’s yet-to-be-released Snapdragon X Elite chipset was just like all the failed attempts to make sense of this platform before it.

That is not what happened. At that meeting, I got my first hands-on experience with Windows 11 on Arm on Snapdragon X Elite wasn’t just a major leap forward, it was a miracle. It wasn’t just better than expected, it was—and still is—better than the unreliable x64-based chipsets foisted on the world by Intel (especially) and AMD. Within a few months, Microsoft had launched the Copilot+ PC platform and I had gotten my first Snapdragon X Elite-based PCs, including a Surface Laptop 7 that is still one of my favorite laptops. Microsoft and Qualcomm had done the impossible. They really did it.

Snapdragon X, even the lowest-end versions, can handle any traditional Windows productivity workload with ease. But as good as this platform is, it’s not perfect. And while the change averse are always quick to jump on any problems with Snapdragon X, real or imagined, there was only one concern, which lingered and continued over the previous 18 months, that I still struggle with. The good news? It only impacts a tiny percentage of people and doesn’t compromise the experience for those who want a PC that just works.
But what about the games?
I am referring, of course, to games. Even on that first day in early 2024, during my first hands-on experience with Snapdragon X Elite, I was surprised to see that Qualcomm was pushing gaming at all, let alone so hard. Microsoft’s Prism emulator has no trouble emulating x64 code, but PC games are unique in that they’re optimized for very specific Nvidia and and Radeon dedicated graphics chipsets. Furthermore, many of the world’s most popular games, like the titles in the Call of Duty series, Fortnite, and many others, require anti-cheat software. Neither of these crucial pieces of the gaming puzzle worked with Arm, and though the processor, GPU, and NPU in Snapdragon X are all notably good, they’re not that good: Even Apple struggles to attract games on the Mac, which has a similar architecture to Snapdragon X, and it’s generations more mature.

And yet there they were, showing off several x64 games, all running in emulation on Snapdragon X Elite prototype laptops. I briefly played Baldur’s Gate, Control, and Redout that day, and each ran normally and without any glitches. This wasn’t staged, in that I and others who showed up for meetings that day were free to play these games, interact with all kinds of other software, and probe these PCs to our hearts’ content without intervention. But I had assumed that Qualcomm (and Microsoft) would focus on the fundamentals, just making Windows 11 on Arm and Snapdragon X—what we would later call Copilot+ PCs—viable for thin and light premium...