Snapdragon X Elite spotted running Baldur's Gate 3 at around 30fps, supporting claims that Windows games 'just work' on ARM chip

HardwareGaming LaptopsSnapdragon X Elite spotted running Baldur’s Gate 3 at around 30fps, supporting claims that Windows games ‘just work’ on ARM chipWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Gale the wizard grins

Last week Snapdragon claimed thatWindows games “just work” on its latest ARM chip, the Snapdragon X Elite. At the time we said we’d believe it when we see it. Well, now we’re seeing it. A small glimpse of it, anyways.Devin Arthur on Xhas filmed an X Elite laptop running Baldur’s Gate 3 at around 30 fps reportedly without any sort of porting taking place.

The video isn’t very long (viaNotebookCheck) and only covers the starting area of Baldur’s Gate 3. The fps counter in the upper left-hand corner of the screen clearly shows it bouncing around just under the 30 fps mark, at least.

Here’s a demo of Baulders Gate 3 running at 1080p hovering around 30FPS, which is perfectly playable! https://t.co/ZieiHtzRlN pic.twitter.com/VvFKbUVK5JMarch 25, 2024

You might be familiar with a translation layer if you’re aSteam Deckuser. Valve employs one called Proton to turn most Windows-based games into games that will run (mostly) happily in a Linux environment, and without a performance hit. Qualcomm is doing something similar with the X Elite, except it’s going one further. Where in that example Windows and SteamOS are both running on the same kind of silicon, Qualcomm is switching the entire software instruction set from x86 to ARM.

Other companies do this same thing: Apple most notable among them. Apple now uses ARM chips of its own design within pretty much every product it manufactures today, but it used to use x86 in its Mac products. Shifting all its software from x86 to ARM was a huge task and there are still plenty of things that aren’t natively built on ARM and have to be translated over to ARM instead.

But Apple has a weak spot: gaming. Almost all games today, be they intended for PC or console, are built for x86 systems. Apple had sought to sort of get around this with theGame Compatibility Toolkit, which is a tool to get games running on ARM, but it’s not being used to actually bring a larger gaming library to Apple devices just yet. Qualcomm’s comparable tool, however, is.

Qualcomm ran a talk over at GDC claiming that Windows on Snapdragon was “ready for your PC games.” That’s a huge claim, and it does seem to extend to newer games like Baldur’s Gate 3.

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Now Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t the most demanding game around, and the lowest preset in the game will run on all sorts of low-end hardware, so we don’t really know exactly where Qualcomm’s low-power ARM chip stands in terms of gaming performance. I imagine from what we’ve seen and what we know about the Snapdragon X Elite—a chip competing with Intel’s Meteor Lake chips—it won’t compete with most modern discrete graphics chips.

I’m still not sure exactly what real-world impact there will be from Qualcomm’s chip. If you really must have gaming performance in a thin and light laptop, you can reliably find it with either Intel or AMD chip. You don’t have to look to ARM for answers. But if Qualcomm has managed to minimise most of the performance hit in shifting a game from x86 to ARM, it could eventually change what constitutes a gaming PC altogether.

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