What you need to know
- Qualcomm’s upcoming PCs will leverage emulation to run x86/64 Windows games at optimum performance.
- Benchmark data showcases a similar performance to the Radeon 780M when played on a Snapdragon X Elite device.
- The company is expected to release these much-anticipated devices later this year during the summer.
At the 2024 Game Developers Conference (GDC), Qualcomm indicated that Windows games should work on its anticipated Arm laptops. If true, x86 emulation and gaming should run perfectly on these devices without porting (via The Verge).
This isn’t a new phenomenon either, as Apple has attempted something similar with its Rosetta 2 translation layer, which supports legacy x86 apps without negatively impacting performance. Apple Silicon cushions performance setbacks when running x86 apps on Arm PCs.
Admittedly, Apple’s x86 emulation may encounter performance challenges when running games. And while it’s possible to run legacy x86 titles on Apple Silicon, the performance aspect might pose a potential challenge.
As shared by The Verge, game devs will have three options to run existing Windows games on the new Qualcomm chip in Arm for Windows:
- They can port their titles to native ARM64 for the best CPU performance and power usage, since Qualcomm’s scheduler can dynamically lower the CPU’s frequency that way.
- They can create a hybrid “ARM64EC” app where Windows and its libraries and Qualcomm’s drivers run natively, but the rest of the app is emulated, for “near-native” performance.
- Or, they can do next to nothing, and their game should just work anyhow — using x64 emulation.
Qualcomm supports its premise by indicating that most Windows games are impacted by GPU-related performance issues more frequently, further citing that the performance of the GPU on a device isn’t impacted by emulation.
To this end, Qualcomm has reportedly run tests on its Snapdragon X Elite laptops with several titles, including Control, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Redout II. Emerging benchmark data showcases a similar performance to the Radeon 780M when played on a Snapdragon X Elite device.
And as it seems, we might not have to wait too long to confirm the authenticity of this bold statement, as Qualcomm is expected to ship its Snapdragon X Series devices later this year.
