Qualcomm 'won't ever be done' optimizing PC games for Snapdragon

One of the outstanding questions that remain for PCs built upon the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is just how well they’ll run, especially games. Qualcomm executives said recently that they’ve made great strides, but that you probably shouldn’t expect every game will run perfectly.

Put another way: It sounds like Qualcomm will do its best…but.

In a call with reporters last Friday, Eric Demers, senior vice president of engineering at Qualcomm, said that Qualcomm will never be done optimizing games.

The Adreno X1 GPU inside the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite runs at about 1.5GHz, about 50 percent higher than any other mobile GPU that Qualcomm produces. We knew last year that Qualcomm had attracted unprecedented support from PC makers, and that’s true; there’s an argument to be made that Qualcomm is the belle of the ball at Computex 2024. Still, there are no overtly gaming laptops built on Snapdragon.

Traditional X86 chipmakers AMD and Intel have been quick to point out that you won’t need to worry about application compatibility with their processors. They’ll just work. That hasn’t been the case historically with Qualcomm. With the Snapdragon X Elite, it may be a challenge for Qualcomm just to keep up with the pace of new releases.

Intel’s early efforts to ship its Arc graphics suffered at the hands of poor, unoptimized drivers. Devers was asked if the Snapdragon X Elite would follow suit.

Further reading: The best gaming laptops

Massive improvements in Windows on Arm optimizations

“I don’t know exactly how much improvement they got,” Devers replied. “But we are working night and day to improve things. I can tell you that even the last few months, we’ve done some improvements on some applications. There were 30X improvements and performance. I mean, really–30 times faster.

“There were crashes, initially,” Devers said. “All of that is hopefully getting cleaned up but it’s [going to take] a long time. If you look on Steam, there’s probably 100,000 games on there. We’re gonna take a while to get through it — I think we’ve got through the top 200. And there’s a lot of optimizations left to be made.

“I actually don’t think we’ll ever be done,” Devers added. “That’s just the truth. We’re getting into a marathon mode where we just have to keep that pace. Make sure we can get through key and important games out quickly, and just go through everything and see what we can improve in the future as well.”

Arm chief executive Rene Haas has his own take on what role Arm plays in the Windows on Arm compatibility process. Read the interview here.

Qualcomm has shown how well games will run on the Snapdragon X Elite, with hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 running at acceptable frame rates (albeit at lower graphics levels). And Qualcomm is picking up the pace.

“Well, we started with the top 20, than the top 50, than the top 200. There are still in the top 200 some games that because of anti-cheat — and there’s various different platforms that support that — couldn’t run at all, and we’re still working [on that]. Many of them have moved over and either have Arm native or Arm-compatible solutions. Now, there’s still a few so we haven’t gotten to those yet, but I’m hoping we make a lot of progress in the coming months.”

Devers said Qualcomm plans to release Adreno drivers for Arm on a monthly basis, via Qualcomm’s website as well as Windows Update. “This is far more frequent than we will do on Android,” he said.

“Our plan is to roll out performance improvements on a very regular basis: bug fixes, and new features, and keep it updated very, very regularly,” Devers said.

Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor

As PCWorld’s senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft news and chip technology, among other beats. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.

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