If you read my scoop last week, I bet you've been wondering: how well could a Snapdragon chip work? in fact run Windows games? At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, the company claimed that Arm could run those titles at speeds close to x86/64, but how fast is fast?
With medium weight games like Control and Baldur's Gate 3It looks like the target might be: 30 frames per second at 1080p screen resolution, medium settings, possibly with AMD's FSR 1.0 spatial upscaling enabled.
That's what Qualcomm has apparently been showing influencers, according to numerous videos from YouTubers, TikTokers and “Snapdragon Insiders,” many of which were uploaded over the past week after they flew to Qualcomm's headquarters in San Diego for the Company Profile. “Day of eXperience”.
While some of the videos seem a bit promotional, one influencer talks about what it looks like”Elden Ring playing very well at about 30 frames per second” while actually showing Baldur's Gate 3 running at only 21-24 fps; Admittedly, it's pretty cool to see games like these running on Arm Silicon.
Enobong Etteh, also known as BooredAtWork, has the video with the most uninterrupted gameplay footage; apparently he had to try Control, Baldur's Gate 3and Redout 2 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this February. In the first scenes of Control that don't demand as much power, we're seeing frame rates dropping as low as 26fps in a gunfight or between 30fps and 40fps just running.
Today's gaming laptops can do better than that, but this is an initial demonstration.
BooredAtWork also suggests later in his video that Baldur's Gate 3 can be played on the laptop with AMD's FSR 1.0 enabled in its “Performance” settings, which allows games to be played at a much lower render resolution than 1080p and attempt to make up the difference with upscaling.
It's worth remembering that we're looking at these games running on a Qualcomm reference design laptop, not the final hardware, and we don't know how much (or little) optimization these games have had. They could work better!
We may now have a clue about battery life as well: JuanBagnell says Qualcomm told him that the entire laptop is “rated to run at around 20-24 watts.” If that's true, and you theoretically put it on a slim laptop with a typical 49.5 watt-hour battery (like the Qualcomm-powered Lenovo ThinkPad X13s), you can divide 49.5 by 24 to get just over two hours Of battery. That would be on par with today's Windows gaming laptops, but not better.
BooredAtWork says Qualcomm told it these laptops already support 250 PC games and should have 500 by launch.
