Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon X Elite Capable of Near-Native x86 Gaming Performance

We are about to witness the arrival of PCs utilizing the Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite CPU, boasting high power, in the market in the middle of this year. Questions arise about app compatibility and the popular group of games on Windows that these Arm-based PCs will support.

Representatives from Qualcomm spoke at the Game Developers Conference 2024 last week, revealing that the Snapdragon X Elite can play old Windows games through an emulator. However, it is a high-performance emulator that works closely to native.

In Qualcomm’s slides, they mentioned that “your game should already work,” meaning game developers don’t need to do anything extra for games to be playable. There are some minor limitations, such as the initial game loading time but subsequent loads from the cache will be faster. The emulator supports up to SSE4 CPU instruction sets and may not support other instruction sets like AVX. It also does not support games that utilize kernel-level drivers, especially anti-cheat systems.

Qualcomm explains that the bottleneck of games often lies in the GPU, not the CPU, but the performance of the emulator depends on the CPU. Therefore, running x86 games on the emulator will affect the CPU more than converting x86 to ARM64, leaving the GPU unaffected. The Adreno GPU also fully supports graphic libraries like DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenCL.

For game developers seeking full performance, they can choose to port their game code to ARM64 in native form or opt for the ARM64EC hybrid approach. This means the operating system, libraries, drivers are native, while the remaining game code runs through the emulator.

Qualcomm also conducted testing of their emulator system with popular games on Steam (without specifying which games) and is confident in the performance delivered.

**TLDR:**
Qualcomm introduces the Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite CPU for PCs, promising compatibility with old Windows games through a high-performance emulator. Game developers don’t need to make significant changes for games to work. The emulator supports SSE4 instruction sets, but might not support AVX. Game performance bottleneck often lies in the GPU, not the CPU. Developers can choose to port their game code to ARM64 in native form or utilize the ARM64EC hybrid approach. Qualcomm is confident in the performance of their emulator system tested with popular games on Steam.