Qualcomm Believes that Most Windows Games Will Run on Snapdragon X Elite

Qualcomm’s “Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games” GDC presentation attracted a low number of attendees according to The Verge’s Sean Hollister (senior editor). The semiconductor firm is readying its Snapdragon X Elite mobile chipset family for launch around mid-2024—prototypes and reference devices have been popping up lately. Leaked Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge specs suggest that Qualcomm’s ARM-based solution is ready to take on Apple’s M3 chipset series. Gaming is not a major priority for many owners of slimline notebooks, but Apple has made efforts to unleash some of its silicon’s full potential in that area. Snapdragon Studios’ GDC showcase outlined a promising future for their X Elite chips—according to Hollister’s coverage of the GDC session, Qualcomm’s principal engineer told “game developers (that) their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops—no porting required.”

Issam Khalil’s presentation covered three different porting paths: x64 emulation, ARM64, and a hybrid approach (via an “ARM64EC” driver). He demonstrated tools that will be available for games developers to start enabling titles on Windows + Snapdragon platforms. The Snapdragon X Elite is capable of running x86/64 games at “close to full speed” via emulation, as claimed in presentation slides. Khalil posits that developers are not required to change the code or assets of their games to achieve full speed performance. Adreno GPU drivers have been prepped for DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL—mapping layers were utilized to grant support for DX9 and OpenGL (up to v4.6). Specific titles were not highlighted as fully operational on Snapdragon X Elite-based devices, but the team has spent time combing through “top games” on Steam.