Qualcomm shared some exciting news about these chips at the Game Developers Conference 2024 as the new ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite laptops are about to be released. They’re especially focused on how well games will run on these devices. According to The Verge, Qualcomm engineers are confident that PC games will easily work on the Snapdragon X Elite chipset.
Games can be supported in three main ways on this new chip. Developers have the option to adjust their games to work directly with the chip’s ARM64 structure for the best performance. Alternatively, they can use something called ARM64EC, which lets parts of the game run natively on the system while emulating others, providing almost the same performance as native. The last option is to rely on Windows x64 emulation, which translates traditional x86 game code to work on the ARM64 system. This might slow down the CPU a bit and use more battery at first, but it gets more efficient over time.
Qualcomm has also worked on making sure the Snapdragon X Elite supports various graphic technologies like DirectX 11, 12, Vulkan, and OpenCL, ensuring games look good and run smoothly.
The company is testing many popular games from Steam on the new chipset and believes that most will run without issues on Windows on ARM platforms. However, games with certain types of anti-cheat systems might not be compatible with this emulation process.
This effort to support Windows games on ARM-based chips is similar to what Apple did with its Rosetta 2 system when switching to its own M-series chips. Microsoft plans to showcase devices with the Snapdragon X Elite chipset, like the Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10, at an event in Seattle this May.