Qualcomm Says its Snapdragon X Elite Chip Should Make Most PC Games “Just Work”

After Microsoft announced its new Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 for Business yesterday, the consumer versions of the devices, which are expected to be announced during another Surface event on May 20, could be the first AI PCs powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips. Qualcomm’s latest silicon should finally match (and maybe even go beyond) the performance of rival Intel and AMD chips, all while offering multiple days of battery life.

Overall, it’s safe to say that expectations around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips are pretty high. That’s especially true after the Mac’s transition from Intel chips to Apple Silicon pretty much put Microsoft and Qualcomm’s latest Windows on ARM efforts to shame.

To this day, Apple’s M-Series chips continue to deliver an unmatched level of performance per watt. With its new M3 chips, Apple also showed that it’s getting serious about gaming on the Mac, with the new chips adding support for advanced features such as hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading. This has already pushed more developers to release native ports of their AA/AAA games on Apple Silicon Macs, with Baldur’s Gate 3, Resident Evil 4 Remake, and Death Stranding just being a few examples.

At the Game Developers Conference this week, Qualcomm held a session dedicated to PC gaming on “Windows on Snapdragon.” During that session, the company detailed how developers could optimize their games on upcoming Windows on Snapdragon devices. In essence, Qualcomm said that most games should “just work” on upcoming devices powered by a Snapdragon X Elite chip.

According to The Verge’s Sean Hollister who attended that session, Qualcomm explained that emulated x86/64 games should offer almost the same level of performance as a native ARM64 port. The company emphasized that GPU performance was unaffected by x64 emulation on Windows on ARM, and that the caching system was “extremely efficient” despite an initial hit to performance when a new block of code is translated.

To improve the performance of their games on upcoming Windows on ARM PCs, developers will be able to choose a hybrid approach and create an “ARM64EC” app that mixes ARM and x64 code. However, porting games to the ARM64 architecture will always guarantee the best level of performance. It will also circumvent current limitations related to x64 emulation, such as the incompatibility of kernel-level anti-cheat drivers.

During that GDC session, Qualcomm also said that it has been testing all the top games on Steam to determine that most of them should work. However, the company didn’t go into specifics and mention any popular games that were currently not compatible via x64 emulation.

Qualcomm seems to be aware that most game developers are not going to release native ARM64 versions of their games while the userbase remains small. “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,” said Micah Knapp, senior director of product management in an interview with The Verge.

By putting M-Series in all of its Macs, Apple obviously has a much better story to tell to game developers. On the PC side, however, it’s highly likely that Intel and AMD chips will remain dominant for quite a while. In recent years, x86 chips have also become more power efficient, with Microsoft promising up to 19 hours of battery life on its Intel Core Ultra-powered Surface Laptop 10 for Business.

However, the upcoming consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 using Qualcomm’s latest silicon should be a big vote of confidence for “Windows on Snapdragon.” Microsoft is also reportedly exploring using ARM chips in its next-gen Xbox consoles, which if true could eventually contribute to making ARM64 game development more popular on the Windows side.