First Snapdragon X Elite laptop reviews point to disappointing gaming performance

You can now purchase Copilot Plus laptops, and Qualcomm is currently the only chip supplier for these systems. These bring the company's latest Snapdragon X series processors, which take full advantage of the Oryon CPU cores, and the currently available fastest chip, Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100, sports 12 cores and boosts up to 4.3 GHz.

With the availability of these Snapdragon X series laptops, we now have an early look at how they perform in gaming. In our review of the Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED, we noted that the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 doesn't offer a satisfactory gaming performance.

A good number of games didn't want to start, and while some did fire up, they crashed after booting up. Moreover, some games didn't allow us to change the resolution to match the screen of the Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED (available on Amazon). As for the games that did run, the frame rates were not as good as one would have hoped earlier.

More specifically, in our tests, the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 with Adreno GPU offered:

• 19 FPS on Witcher 3 at 1080p with ultra graphics and postprocessing set to HBAO+
• 20.4 FPS on GTA V at 1080p with highest graphics settings, 4x MSAA and 16x FX AF
• 15.6 FPS on Final Fantasy X at 1080 with high graphics settings
• 37 FPS on Strange Brigade at 1080p with ultra settings
• 51.1 FPS on Dota 2 Reborn at 1080p with ultra settings

Given the performance, we gave the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 an overall rating of 39.8 points. The other reviewers shared the same story, with all of them reporting that the gaming performance is currently the biggest weak point of the new Qualcomm ARM chips.

To Qualcomm's defense, the productivity performance is great. What's more interesting is that the Snapdragon X Elite can deliver almost full performance while the laptop is on battery. That is something that you don't get on other Windows laptops. You can get a better idea by watching the review videos attached below.