A set of Microsoft Surface hardware is currently said to debut closer to the company’s Build 2024 event, following today’s business launch. These are said to be running the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips. Of course, there’s the expectation that other brands will have their own hardware running said chips, some of which may inevitably be gaming laptops. If anyone is thinking of giving these laptops a try, but are worried about gaming compatibility with the chip, the company says not to worry.
The Verge cites a GDC presentation by Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil, who notes that the as-of-yet unannounced laptops running the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips “will use emulation to run x86/64 games at close to full speed”. And that is without devs having to do much of anything. Of course, there is the option to improve this.
One of which involves devs creating a hybrid “ARM64EC” app runs Windows libraries and Qualcomm drivers natively, and emulating the rest for “near-native” performance. Naturally, the other is doing the full porting process to native ARM64.
Also noted in the presentation is that while emulation will see CPU performance take a hit, most graphically intense games rely on GPU anyway. Beyond that, if a game needs kernel-level drivers, say for anti-cheat purposes, then emulation won’t work. Other exceptions include games that use AVX instruction sets.
While Qualcomm says that most games will work fine with laptops running the Snapdragon X Elite – minus the exceptions mentioned above. No specific titles were named, but the company says that it is “checking out all of the top games on Steam”.
On a related note, the report also quotes Qualcomm senior director of product management Micah Knapp as saying that he has seen an Arm machine run faster than x86, or get better battery life, just not both at the same time. Claims aside, we’ll have to wait until more people get access to such hardware to test for themselves.
(Source: The Verge)
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