Qualcomm says most Windows games should run on its unreleased Arm laptops

Fifteen years after its first attempt, can Qualcomm replicate Apple’s feat and finally create an Arm-based laptop worth buying?This is an incredibly promising sign: Qualcomm is telling game developers their games should already at work On upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, no porting is required.

At the 2024 Game Developers Conference titled “Windows on Snapdragon, a platform ready for your PC gaming,” Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil said the unreleased laptop will use emulation to run at near full speed x86/64 games.

These laptops may be available soon.Sources say Qualcomm has confirmed it will launch Snapdragon edge.

In 2020, we wrote about how Apple revolutionized our notion of laptop performance overnight, including how its Rosetta 2 translation layer allowed these chips to run legacy x86 applications without significant performance hit. However, although Windows has supported x64 emulation for some time, we don’t feel that Qualcomm has such confidence in it.

Khalil explained that for Snapdragon-based Windows, developers have three options:

• They can port their games to native ARM64 to get the best CPU performance and power consumption because Qualcomm’s scheduler can dynamically reduce the CPU frequency this way.
• They could create a hybrid “ARM64EC” application where Windows and its libraries and Qualcomm’s drivers run natively, but the rest of the application is emulated for “near-native” performance.
• Or, they do almost nothing and their games should work anyway – using x64 emulation.

Developers won’t need to change the game’s code or assets to get it running at full speed, he said. The graphics bottleneck in most games is the GPU, not the CPU, and Qualcomm says GPU performance is not affected. While Qualcomm has seen some slight impact on CPU performance when converting or converting between x64 and ARM64, this only occurs the first time a block of code is converted – “subsequent passes are direct cache accesses,” Khalil said.

Qualcomm says it has Adreno GPU drivers for DX11, DX12, Vulkan and OpenCL, and will also support DX9 and up to OpenGL 4.6 through a mapping layer.

As you can see in the slideshow above, there are some caveats: Games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat drivers (which are increasingly popular, although some players are now concerned about hacking) will not be able to play under emulation run. Currently, games that use the AVX instruction set don’t, and Khalil recommends that developers use SIMDe to get a huge head start in converting them to NEON code. The same is true for ARM64EC.

While he didn’t reveal specific game titles or how many games Qualcomm has tested, he said the company is checking all popular games on Steam, and doing so gives Qualcomm confidence that most games should work.

Micah Knapp, senior director of product management, told me in a recent interview that it’s important for Qualcomm to be able to offer existing games: “In the near future, not too far away, you have to provide a platform for the games that people already have. ”.

“As much as I want this to happen, I don’t think all developers are going to wake up overnight and say we’re going to port everything to Arm tomorrow,” he said.

Note that we don’t yet know exactly how fast the Snapdragon X Elite chip will be for gaming, emulated or not.When I asked Knapp if he had ever seen Arm running games faster and Better battery life than x86, he told me he’d seen that too, but not both.

There were only about 33 people in the audience for Qualcomm’s GDC talk, including myself and at least one other Qualcomm employee, but I took some rough photos of the slides included above so you can take a look, too.

x86 gaming portability is all the rage. Valve’s Steam Deck is working hard to bring more Windows games to Linux, Apple has a tool to bring them to Mac, and now Microsoft and Qualcomm may be bringing them to different flavors of Windows as well.