Can Qualcomm replicate Apple's feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years later? his first attempts? Here's an incredibly promising sign that it could be: Qualcomm is telling game developers that their titles should I already work In a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, portability is not required.
In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session titled “Windows on Snapdragon, a platform ready for your PC games,” Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil highlighted that the unannounced laptops will use emulation to run x86 games. /64 almost at maximum speed.
Those laptops may arrive quickly. Qualcomm has confirmed it will launch Snapdragon The edge.
In 2020, we wrote about how Apple changed our view of laptop performance overnight, including how its Rosetta 2 translation layer allowed those chips to run legacy x86 applications without major changes in performance. But while Windows has supported x64 emulation for a while, we didn't get the sense that Qualcomm was that confident about it yet.
With Windows on Snapdragon, developers have three options, Khalil explained:
- They can port their titles to native ARM64 for the best CPU performance and power usage, as the Qualcomm scheduler can dynamically reduce the CPU frequency that way.
- “They can create a hybrid”ARM64EC”where Windows and its libraries and Qualcomm drivers run natively, but the rest of the application is emulated, for “near-native” performance.
- Or, they can't do much of anything and your game should work anyway, using x64 emulation.
It says developers shouldn't need to change the code or assets of their games to get maximum speed. Most games have a graphics bottleneck caused by the GPU, not the CPU, and Qualcomm says GPU performance is not affected. And while Qualcomm sees a slight hit to CPU performance when translating or transitioning between x64 and ARM64, it only happens the first time a block of code is translated: “subsequent passes are direct access to the cache,” he says Khalil.
Qualcomm says it has Adreno GPU drivers for DX11, DX12, Vulkan and OpenCL and will also support DX9 and up to OpenGL 4.6 via mapping layers.
As you can see in the slide above, there are some caveats: games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat drivers (which have been gaining popularity, although some players now fear hacks) will not work under emulation. For now, neither will the games that use AVX Instruction Setswhere Khalil suggests developers use SIMDe to get a big advantage when converting them to NEON code. Those things are also true with ARM64EC.
While he didn't mention specific games that work or how many games Qualcomm has tested, he says the company is reviewing all the best games on Steam, and in doing so, Qualcomm is confident that most titles should work.
It's important for Qualcomm to be able to offer existing games, senior director of product management Micah Knapp told me in a recent interview: “In the immediate future, near and not so near, you have to provide a platform for what people already have. .”
“As much as I would love to see this happen, I don't think every developer is going to wake up overnight and say we're going to move all of our stuff to Arm tomorrow,” he said.
Mind you, we still don't know how fast a Snapdragon X Elite chip really is for gaming, with emulation or not. When I asked Knapp if he had seen Arm run a game faster and get better battery life than x86, he told me he's seen either one, not both.
Only about 33 people were in the audience for Qualcomm's GDC talk, including myself and at least one other Qualcomm employee, but I took some preview photos of the slideshow that I've included above so you can see it too.
x86 game portability is having a moment. Valve's efforts on Steam Deck brought more Windows games to Linux, Apple has a tool that brings them to Mac, and now maybe Microsoft and Qualcomm will bring them to a different version of Windows as well.
