At last year’s Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm revealed that its Snapdragon X Elite family would emerge this year, promising the “most powerful, intelligent, and efficient processor in its class for Windows.”
It sounds extremely promising, with talk of on-device generative AI, huge battery life and performance to rival Apple’s M-series processors. And now it seems that laptops powered by Snapdragon X Elite will have something that Apple has traditionally struggled with.
In a slide on x64 emulation outlining the advantages and disadvantages of the new platform, the phrase “your game should already work” appears prominently, with the added bonus that “GPU performance [is] unaffected by x64 emulation”.
There are a handful of caveats, with the most prominent being that it won’t work with kernel drivers (such as anti-cheat systems for multiplayer games), but overall this sounds like an extremely promising development for gamers.
If Qualcomm’s walk matches its talk, it sounds like that won’t matter too much and Snapdragon X Elite machines will run games only marginally worse if unoptimized. The company has apparently been testing the top games on Steam, and the results make it confident enough to suggest widespread compatibility.
But it’s important to remember that we still don’t know how good gaming performance will be on the chipset even when fully optimized. All we know from this is that emulation will be close to native performance — whether that’s good, bad or middling.
Nonetheless, this is an exciting development for gamers. While you can play plenty of games on Apple Silicon either natively or via the Rosetta 2 translation layer, performance can be patchy.
