Qualcomm shared an exciting teaser during the 2024 Game Developers Conference (GDC), hinting that the PC gaming market may not be so limited to the x86 architecture in the future. The company spoke during a session titled “Windows on Snapdragon, a platform ready for your PC games” and claimed that Windows games will simply run on laptops equipped with the latest Snapdragon X Elite chip — not required extra preparation — all thanks to emulation .
As reported by The lip, Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil discussed how the company hopes to achieve realistic gaming on the ARM-based chip as early as May of this year. Khalil explained the ins and outs of x86/64 emulation on the Snapdragon X Elite, explaining that game developers will be able to port their titles to the native ARM64 for best performance, but can also make “next to nothing” – the game it should just work anyway due to x64 emulation.
The third option is to build a hybrid ARM64EC implementation that makes Windows, Windows libraries, and Qualcomm drivers run natively. However, the rest of the application is simulated.
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According to Khalil, game developers won’t need to change the code for their games to work as intended on the Snapdragon X Elite system-on-a-chip (SoC). This is because most games are more affected by the graphics card than the processor, and Qualcomm claims that GPU performance will not be affected by emulation.
Qualcomm is reportedly testing most of the top games on Steam to make sure they’ll run through emulation in preparation for the big day. However, this development is not without challenges. Performance is one thing. Micah Knapp, senior director of product management at Qualcomm, told The Verge that he’s seen ARM run games faster than x86 chips, and he’s seen them run games while delivering better battery life, but never at the same time.
Qualcomm’s presentation also mentions an important caveat — there appears to be a lack of compatibility with games that use a kernel driver, which is common in titles with anti-cheat systems. The same goes for games that use the AVX instruction set.
We’ve already seen early benchmarks of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, and its performance is promising — especially in light of these new developments. The chip is said to come with a GPU that is as powerful as the integrated graphics found in Intel’s new Core Ultra laptop processors.
In the meantime, Tom’s Hardware speculates that popular Windows titles such as Baldur’s Gate 3 it should perform at a similar level to AMD’s Radeon 780M GPU when running on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop. If Qualcomm can actually achieve this type of gaming performance without requiring extra work from game developers, we may be about to see a boom in ARM gaming.
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