An developer from Qualcomm asserted during the 2024 Game Developers Conference that the future Snapdragon X Elite notebooks will be capable of running a wide range of Windows games. According to the engineer, Issam Khalil, there are three methods to enable these games to operate on the forthcoming computers.
One of these enables game makers to port their creations to the ARM64 natively. According to Khalil, this will optimize CPU performance and power consumption because Qualcomm’s scheduler can dynamically reduce the processor’s frequency as needed. That is, this way of running Windows games on the Snapdragon X Elite does not involve an emulation layer in the middle.
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.
