News Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops suffer compatibility issues with many games — even Intel's integrated Arc Graphics is up to 3x faster

[Admin]

Snapdragon X Elite advertised 'flawless' Windows gaming on Arm, but the truth lands far from that lofty goal. Some games run quite well, but many have problems and older games ofter refuse to run at all.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops suffer compatibility issues with many games — even Intel's integrated Arc Graphics is up to 3x faster : Read more

 

[Notton]

Touching the touch screen boosts fps.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2EJnLOSOOc

 

[usertests]

These are the laptops they want you to pay $1300+ for. Nice try, again.

 

[TechyIT223]

""Intel's Arc Graphics in the Core Ultra 7 155H has 4.6 teraflops of compute

But then next month we'll get AMD's 'Strix Point' Ryzen AI processors, with up to 5.8 teraflops of compute"".


From the Article. Are those teraflops values correct, btw ? 🤔

 

[Amdlova]

1300us for a smart phone is dumb as f.
If I dock the s23 put a portable screen and keyboard and mouse become that "notebook" lol

 

[NinoPino]

The target of these laptops is not games, neither occasional gaming so actually isn't a problem, but, all compatibility problems with softwares is a Microsoft responsability and is an extremely serious handicap. A small performance problem is acceptable but an incompatibility is unacceptable.
Microsoft WTF ?

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

So basically it's the same thing we saw, and still see, when Apple switched to ARM from x86? Who would have thought?!

 

[ThomasKinsley]

You might get a different result in Linux gaming, but these will not excel at gaming until the games are natively written for them. Since the majority of gamers are on x86, developers will continue to write for x86. ARM will excel at non-gaming use for now: battery life, productivity work, content consumption, etc. Those are all things valued in 99% of laptops.

 

[usertests]

The target of these laptops is not games, neither occasional gaming

I don't agree. They could have shrunk the iGPU significantly if that was the case. Instead, it's supposed to be comparable to AMD's Phoenix.

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-tablets/snapdragon-x-elite

Their marketing mentions "The premium integrated Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU delivers stunning graphics for immersive entertainment." I wonder what "immersive entertainment" means? 🤔

"Premium integrated GPU delivers stunning graphics performance"

So mysterious.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

I don't agree. They could have shrunk the iGPU significantly if that was the case. Instead, it's supposed to be comparable to AMD's Phoenix.

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-tablets/snapdragon-x-elite

Their marketing mentions "The premium integrated Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU delivers stunning graphics for immersive entertainment." I wonder what "immersive entertainment" means? 🤔

"Premium integrated GPU delivers stunning graphics performance"

So mysterious.

It can game, but the games need to be coded for it. If developers are using tricks and shortcuts to get their games optimized for AMD and/or Intel and not coding for Qualcomm, then you get this kind of result. It's a chicken-egg problem. What comes first: the hardware or the compatibility for it? Because Apple has a good relationship with developers and because it controls the whole ecosystem, they were able to convince most of the major developers to commit to transitioning to native coding for Apple Silicon before it was released. Neither Microsoft nor Qualcomm have this kind of control over the ecosystem or relationship with developers.

 

[NinoPino]

I don't agree. They could have shrunk the iGPU significantly if that was the case. Instead, it's supposed to be comparable to AMD's Phoenix.

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-tablets/snapdragon-x-elite

Their marketing mentions "The premium integrated Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU delivers stunning graphics for immersive entertainment." I wonder what "immersive entertainment" means? 🤔

"Premium integrated GPU delivers stunning graphics performance"

So mysterious.

In the Qualcomm marketing for the SOC yes, but the laptops reviewed, for price and characteristics are not aimed at games. As is not targeted at games the Microsoft Surfaces, Lenovo Think pads and Apple Macbooks.

 

[bit_user]

I don't agree. They could have shrunk the iGPU significantly if that was the case. Instead, it's supposed to be comparable to AMD's Phoenix.

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-tablets/snapdragon-x-elite

Their marketing mentions "The premium integrated Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU delivers stunning graphics for immersive entertainment." I wonder what "immersive entertainment" means? 🤔

"Premium integrated GPU delivers stunning graphics performance"

So mysterious.

Maybe they went with a larger iGPU mainly so they could score better on some of the GPU-related benchmarks. That could be just a tactic to gin up better overall rating from professional reviewers and eliminate a possible item from the "cons" column.

I think it's clear these aren't gaming laptops and anyone buying them for such needs to have their head checked.

 

[NinoPino]

It can game, but the games need to be coded for it. If developers are using tricks and shortcuts to get their games optimized for AMD and/or Intel and not coding for Qualcomm, then you get this kind of result. It's a chicken-egg problem. What comes first: the hardware or the compatibility for it? Because Apple has a good relationship with developers and because it controls the whole ecosystem, they were able to convince most of the major developers to commit to transitioning to native coding for Apple Silicon before it was released. Neither Microsoft nor Qualcomm have this kind of control over the ecosystem or relationship with developers.

Imho is not the point, Microsoft can do a better work for sure. The JIT emulation for games is not so penalising considering that a good 70%/90% of processing is done by GPUs.
And most importantly emulation must work in all cases, exceptions should be only esoteric softwares like antipiracies, drivers, antivirus and so on.

 

[TechyIT223]

Buying these solely for gaming would be just plain stupid.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

Imho is not the point, Microsoft can do a better work for sure. The JIT emulation for games is not so penalising considering that a good 70%/90% of processing is done by GPUs.
And most importantly emulation must work in all cases, exceptions should be only esoteric softwares like antipiracies, drivers, antivirus and so on.

Optimization goes beyond emulation. The first example in the video below on Apple Silicon showcases how optimization can make the difference between running a game at 30fps and 60fps, whether it is running in emulation or not. Right now I'd venture to say most products on the market are unoptimized for Qualcomm's Elite chip. Microsoft promises developers, including Adobe, are working on native apps for ARM. When game developers jump on that bandwagon and begin optimizing for the Elite, then we will have a more accurate understanding of what it can do.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEyf4sEMPAM

 

[NinoPino]

Optimization goes beyond emulation. The first example in the video below on Apple Silicon showcases how optimization can make the difference between running a game at 30fps and 60fps, whether it is running in emulation or not. Right now I'd venture to say most products on the market are unoptimized for Qualcomm's Elite chip. Microsoft promises developers, including Adobe, are working on native apps for ARM. When game developers jump on that bandwagon and begin optimizing for the Elite, then we will have a more accurate understanding of what it can do.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEyf4sEMPAM

The video is about native executable vs rosetta 2 and not about "optimization".
It is obvious that native executables perform better, but my point is that with games, the problem is not the emulated performances, because we get enough also with emulation (as your video demostrate well, in fact all the titles shown are perfectly playable also with rosette 2) but the main problem is the lack of compatibility, that is unacceptable from Microsoft.

 

[thestryker]

I wouldn't be surprised if the problems were a split between Qualcomm drivers and the translation layer. I would love to see more examination on the gaming results with regards to how well the CPU/GPU are being leveraged.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect these Qualcomm based laptops to be capable of basic 1080p/720p gaming, but the combination of things that don't run and the atrocious lows that clearly isn't the case yet.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

The video is about native executable vs rosetta 2 and not about "optimization".

Correct, however in the first minute the creator notes that Beyond the Steel Sky ran at 30fps before the devs released a universal binary that included a native ARM version and an optimized x86-64 version designed for Rosetta 2, which allowed both variants to run closer to 60fps. My point is that most games are probably lacking optimization for ARM or Windows emulation and could be contributing to these poor results.

It is obvious that native executables perform better, but my point is that with games, the problem is not the emulated performances, because we get enough also with emulation (as your video demostrate well, in fact all the titles shown are perfectly playable also with rosette 2) but the main problem is the lack of compatibility, that is unacceptable from Microsoft.

I fully agree here.

 

[NinoPino]

Correct, however in the first minute the creator notes that Beyond the Steel Sky ran at 30fps before the devs released a universal binary that included a native ARM version and an optimized x86-64 version designed for Rosetta 2, which allowed both variants to run closer to 60fps. My point is that most games are probably lacking optimization for ARM or Windows emulation and could be contributing to these poor results.

Sorry I missed this case. Interesting. I suppose it was related to DirectX to Metal conversion.
However on Windows for ARM at least we won't need a API conversion.
We hope in Qualcomm drivers optimization.

 

[lordmogul]

The Adreno graphics in the Snapdragon X Elite offer up a theoretical 4.6 teraflops of FP32 compute. The iGPU shares memory with the rest of the system, with up to 135 GB/s of bandwidth thanks to the LPDDR5x-8448 memory. A Steam Deck using an AMD 'Van Gogh' APU by contrast has a seemingly pathetic 1.6 teraflops of compute and 102 GB/s of bandwidth.

But that doesn't say anything about real world performance.
The HD 7870 had 4.3 TFLOPS and 288 GB/s bandwith, the GTX 680 had 3.0 GFLOPS and 192 GB/s, but both had very similar performance in the real world.