A few days ago Qualcomm held a conference on new processors with ARM Snapdragon
This announcement attracted a lot of attention since this processor is focused on ultraportable equipment where the main thing is autonomy and connectivity, completely leaving aside gaming options.
Fair performance
It hasn’t been that long since this announcement and we already have a first test of how the Snapdragon X Elite of Qualcomm running a game, specifically Baldur’s Gate 3. According to the video posted on Twitter by Devin Arthur, a computer with Windows and this new ARM architecture processor is capable of running this game at 30 FPS at 1080p using a X64 emulator, so the game was not adapted to this architecture.
Here’s a demo of Baulders Gate 3 running at 1080p hovering around 30FPS, which is perfectly playable! https://t.co/VvFKbUVK5J https://t.co/ZieiHtzRlN
March 27, 2024 • 12:01 p.m.
Although 30 FPS is not much, the ideal would be a minimum of 60, but for these types of games it is sufficient. This video does not show what graphics settings established the game or the characteristics of the equipment, in particular the TDP with which it is configured.
During the presentation of this new line of Qualcomm processors for PCs, he showed a slide in which he declared that its performance was 80% higher than that of the iGPU Raden 780M. To give us an idea, it is interesting to know that the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS With the Radeon 780M graphics card, it is capable of running this title between 25 and 40 FPS with a TDP of 30W.
But, as we said above, we still need to know information about the configuration of the equipment and the game, but it seems that it does not look bad, although, if Qualcomm wants whether this processor is also used for games, there is still a long way to go, due to lack of knowing what the performance of the most powerful processor from the same manufacturer will be: Snapdragon
3 Ways to Run Windows Games on ARM CPUs
Qualcomm has stated that developers have to do absolutely nothing on their part to make current games work with this new processor, since it allows the use of an X64 emulator which is responsible for emulating this environment, although it offers a slower performance What if the title was adapted to this architecture.
Another option is to run the game via ARM64EC, emulating the x64 architecture but using that architecture’s native drivers and libraries. This option offers a superior performance to the emulator in its entirety. But, if you want to get the most out of it, the best way to do so is to adapt the game to this architecture in order to offer the better performance and better energy efficiency.
The launch of the new range of Qualcomm ARM processors It is planned for the second half of 2024, but we will have to wait a few months to see if the major developers bet on this platform and adapt their games or if, on the contrary, users who trust Qualcomm will have no other choice than to use an x64 emulator.
For the moment, Google has just released a version of Chrome for ARM processors that run Windows. Microsoft and Adobe, the main application developers, have already adapted them to this architecture since they have been available for 3 years on Apple computers equipped with the Apple Mx processor.
