On the occasion of the Game Developers Conference 2024, Qualcomm returned to talk about the new Snapdragon X Elite SoC and the first notebooks that will welcome the processor, placing emphasis on the gaming segment.
In fact, according to the company, the devices equipped with Snapdragon X Elite they will be able to emulate most games at maximum speed and without specific developer intervention.
Emulation and performance
During the panel entitled “Windows on Snapdragon, a platform ready for PC gaming”, Issam Khalil confirmed that the first not yet announced laptops with Snapdragon X Elite will arrive during the summer.
Regarding these, the Qualcomm engineer then explained that – on the gaming front – the developers they can follow three different approaches, but all functional. The first option is to port the titles to ARM64, which will allow you to fully exploit all the capabilities of the new CPU thanks to dynamic frequency modulation.
The second approach instead involves the creation of a hybrid “ARM64EC” application: in this case Windows, its libraries and Qualcomm drivers will be executed natively, but the rest of the processes will be emulated, all with the aim of obtaining “almost native”.
The last way, perhaps the most interesting, does not involve any operation on the part of the developers: In fact, most video games should run automatically via x64 emulation. According to Khalil, the new Qualcomm CPU experiences limited performance drops in the transition from x64 to ARM64 and should therefore not compromise the general quality of performance.
In the first available benchmarks, Snapdragon X Elite proved to be up to par with the competition, with even superior multi-core performance.
Which games are already optimized?
Qualcomm did not provide a specific list of already optimized games but said it has tested all the most important games in the Steam catalog. As often happens, the company's words must be taken with a pinch of salt: if it is true that gaming performance may not suffer any disadvantages from emulation, at the moment we do not know how and to what extent the process will affect – for example – consumption and duration of the battery.
Although inviting, Qualcomm's statements could serve to incentivize manufacturers to adopt its platform. We remain confident, waiting to see the first independent tests with our own eyes.
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