Uploading its beta v31.0.96.0 driver, Qualcomm is “committed to continuously improving your experience” with a trio of newly supported games, upgrades to existing titles, and a batch of stability fixes for ARM64-native Windows 11 apps like Adobe Photoshop and Blender.
Playing PC games on Windows PCs running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors has been a mixed bag since the first batch of laptops, led by the launch of ASUS’ Vivobook S 15 Copilot+ PC.
Early performance varied from passable to shockingly impressive in examples like Zac Bowden’s review of the Vivobook S15, so it’s great to see Qualcomm using these driver updates to improve the experience and support popular PC games like the “perfect sequel” of Kingdom Come Deliverance II.
If your Windows PC has a Snapdragon X Elite chip and not the Snapdragon X Plus (an important distinction), you can manually download the driver from Qualcomm’s software center here.
Creators will benefit from the update, too, particularly if you use Adobe’s suite in your daily workflow with apps like Lightroom on a Snapdragon X Elite PC with 16GB of RAM.
Patch notes: Games enabled
- Kingdom Come Deliverance II
- Helldivers
- Palworld
- Jagged Alliance 3
- World War Z
- Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
- BodyCam
- Cities: Skylines II
- Forge of Empires
- Core Keeper
- Satisfactory
- Tiny Glade
- Genshin Impact
Improved performance for existing games
- Left 4 Dead 2
- Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
- Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition
- The Sims 4
- Borderlands 3
Bug fixes for Windows 11
- Fixed corruption in WPS during zoom.
- Fixed Adobe Scene Edit Detection corruption.
- Improved performance in Adobe Photoshop.
- Fixed crashes in Adobe Lightroom on 16GB devices.
- Fixed cube rendering issues in Blender App.
- Fixed crash seen in Football Manager 2022 game during screen recording.
- Fixed AV1E MVHV failures.
- Fixed black screen issue during video playback in VLC Player.
Moving closer to Qualcomm’s goals
We have always remained realistic when discussing the topic of gaming on Snapdragon X Elite laptops, but it doesn’t stop ARM64 gaming performance improvements from being exciting.
Epic Games and Qualcomm are already pairing up to solve the issue of missing anti-cheat support and allow the phenomenally popular Fortnite to come to Snapdragon X laptops, so seeing similarly successful games like the crossplay-enabled Palworld come to the platform is encouraging.
Native ARM64 builds would always be better for gaming performance. Still, updates like these bring us closer to running these titles “just fine” using x64 emulation, as Qualcomm boasted in the early days of Windows on Snapdragon.
Selfishly, my long-term dream for Qualcomm is to see it partner with PC gaming handheld OEMs similar to the recently-announced Android-based devices running Snapdragon G chips and succeed in this evolving market.
The rapid progression of Intel’s platform-agnostic XeSS 2 upscaling technology and its competitors have legitimized the concept of AAA gaming in ultra-portable form factors with low-power processors running at maximum efficiency — whether Qualcomm can offer a comparable suite for PC gaming is up for debate, but more competition is always good.
