Most Windows games should «just work» on future laptops with Snapdragon ─ Qualcomm processors

During the Game Developers Conference, Qualcomm informed game developers that their games should already run on the wave of upcoming Windows laptops based on Snapdragon chips. To launch games, there will be no need to port games to the Qualcomm platform.

Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil said that the unannounced laptops will use emulation to run x86/64 games at almost full speed.

These laptops may soon appear on the market. Qualcomm has confirmed that it will release Snapdragon X Elite systems this summer, and unannounced consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 with these chips are expected in May.

«Your game should already be working», — Qualcomm says.

With Windows laptops based on Snapdragon chips, developers have three options, Khalil explained:

• Move their designs to the ARM64 architecture for the best processor performance and power consumption, as Qualcomm’s scheduler can dynamically reduce processor frequency in this way.
• Create a hybrid ARM64EC application where Windows and its libraries, as well as Qualcomm drivers, run natively, but the rest of the application is emulated for «near-native» performance.
• Almost nothing can be done, and their game should still run — with x64 emulation.

He says developers don’t need to change the code or resources of their games to get full speed. Most games are graphically limited by the GPU, not the CPU, and Qualcomm says GPU performance will not be affected. And while Qualcomm sees some CPU performance impact during the transition between x64 and ARM64, it only occurs during the first translation of a block of code — «subsequent passes are direct cache accesses», — says Khalil.

Qualcomm says it has Adreno GPU drivers for DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL, and will support DX9 and up to OpenGL 4.6 through display layers.

However, not everything is as rosy as we would like. Games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat drivers (which are growing in popularity) will not work in emulation mode. For the time being, games that use AVX instruction sets will also not work, where Khalil suggests that developers use SIMDe.

The company did not name specific games that work through emulation or how many games it has tested. However, Qualcomm tests all the top games on Steam, and this makes it confident that most games should work.

Source: The Verge