Can Qualcomm replicate Apple\u2019s feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years after its first attempts? Here\u2019s one incredibly promising sign it might: Qualcomm is telling game developers their titles should already work<\/em> on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops \u2014 no porting required. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session titled \u201cWindows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games,\u201d Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil drove home that the unannounced laptops will use emulation to run x86\/64 games at close to full speed. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Those laptops may be coming fast. Qualcomm has confirmed it will launch Snapdragon X Elite systems this summer, and unannounced consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 are expected in May with those chips, sources told The Verge<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 2020, we wrote how Apple upended our concept of laptop performance overnight, including how its Rosetta 2 translation layer let those chips run legacy x86 apps without major performance hits. But while Windows has supported x64 emulation for a while, we didn\u2019t get the sense that Qualcomm was this confident about it yet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n With Windows on Snapdragon, devs have three options, Khalil explained: <\/p>\n<\/div>\n He says developers shouldn\u2019t need to change the code or assets of their games to get full speed. Most games are graphically bottlenecked by the GPU, not the CPU, and Qualcomm says GPU performance is unaffected. And while Qualcomm sees some slight hit to CPU performance when it\u2019s translating or transitioning between x64 and ARM64, it only happens the first time a block of code gets translated \u2014 \u201csubsequent passes are direct cache access,\u201d Khalil says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Qualcomm says it has Adreno GPU drivers for DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL and will also support DX9 and up to OpenGL 4.6 via mapping layers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As you can see in the slide above, there are a few caveats: games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat drivers (which have been growing in popularity, though some players now fear hacks) won\u2019t work under emulation. For now, neither will games that use AVX instruction sets, where Khalil suggests developers use SIMDe to get a huge headstart on converting them to NEON code. Those things are true with ARM64EC as well. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n While he wouldn\u2019t name specific games that work or how many games Qualcomm has tested, he says the company\u2019s checking out all the top games on Steam \u2014 and that doing so makes Qualcomm confident that most titles should work. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s important for Qualcomm to be able to offer existing games, senior director of product management Micah Knapp told me in a recent interview: \u201cIn the immediate, near, and not so near future, you have to provide a platform for what people already have.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAs much as I would love for this to happen, I don\u2019t think all the developers are going to wake up overnight and say we\u2019re going to port all our stuff to Arm tomorrow,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mind you, we don\u2019t yet know how fast a Snapdragon X Elite chip really is at playing games, emulation or no. When I asked Knapp if he\u2019s seen Arm run a game faster and<\/em> get better battery life than x86, he told me he\u2019s seen either \u2014 not both. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Only about 33 people were in the audience for Qualcomm\u2019s GDC talk, including myself and at least one other Qualcomm employee \u2014 but I took some rough pictures of the slide deck that I\u2019ve included above so you can get a look as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n x86 game portability is having a moment. Valve\u2019s Steam Deck efforts brought more Windows games to Linux, Apple has a tool that brings them to Mac, and now maybe Microsoft and Qualcomm will bring them to a different flavor of Windows, too. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] Can Qualcomm replicate Apple\u2019s feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years after its first attempts? Here\u2019s one incredibly promising sign it might: Qualcomm is telling game developers their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops \u2014 no porting required. In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32979"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n