Most Windows games should "just work" on Snapdragon X Elite, says Qualcomm

At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, an engineer from Qualcomm claimed that the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite notebooks will have what it takes to run various Windows games. The engineer, Issam Khalil, says there are three ways to make the upcoming laptops run these titles.

Among them, there's one that allows game developers to natively port their titles to ARM64. Khalil explains this will result in the best CPU performance and power usage as Qualcomm's scheduler will be able to dynamically lower the processor's frequency when required. That is, there's no emulation layer in the middle for this method to run Windows games on Snapdragon X Elite.

Then, there's the option to develop a hybrid "ARM64EC" app in which the Windows libraries and drivers from Qualcomm run natively. The rest of the app will be emulated. Issam Khalil says that this method will deliver "near-native" performance.

The last method is the most interesting one. It requires the Windows game developers to do absolutely nothing, but the titles will still work on the Snapdragon X Elite laptops. For those wondering, in this case, the games will run through x64 emulation, which, as you can tell, isn't the most optimized solution for performance.

Khalil says that there is a slight hit to the CPU performance when Snapdragon X Elite transitions from x64 to ARM64. But it's only during the first time when a block of code is getting translated. The subsequent passes are directly accessed from the cache.

Qualcomm also says that the Snapdragon X Elite has Adreno GPU drivers for Vulkan, DX11, DX12, and OpenCL. There's also support for OpenGL 4.6 and DX9 through mapping layers. But, the company didn't share which specific Windows games work flawlessly on the notebooks.

All that Khalil said is that Qualcomm has checked out all the top Steam games and is confident that most Windows titles should work on Snapdragon X Elite. But, again, it should be noted that there was no clear indication of how capable the new laptops are in running games.

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