At last year's Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm revealed that the Snapdragon X Elite family would arrive this year, promising "the most powerful, intelligent and efficient processor in its class for Windows."

Generative AI on devices, enormous battery life, and performance that rivals Apple's M-series processors sound very promising. And now, a laptop with Snapdragon X Elite is going to get what Apple has traditionally been bad at.

At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, The Verge attended a session hosted by Qualcomm engineer Isam Khalil, who told the 30 or so people in attendance that, with improved x64 emulation, Snapdragon's He assured the 30 or so people in attendance that the next generation of Windows laptops should be able to run games immediately without the need for porting.

A slide on x64 emulation outlining the advantages and disadvantages of the new platform featured the phrase "your game should already work" prominently, with the added bonus that "GPU performance is not affected by x64 emulation." .

This is important because the GPU is usually the bottleneck. Qualcomm also admits that there is a slight impact on CPU performance when converting between x64 and ARM64, but this should only occur on new code blocks thanks to the "extremely efficient" cache system. Khalil is quoted as saying, "Subsequent passes access the cache directly."

There are some caveats, most notably that it will not work with kernel drivers (such as anti-cheat systems for multiplayer games), but overall the development looks very promising for gamers.

Developers could port their titles to native ARM64 (which allows Qualcomm to dynamically adjust CPU frequency for performance and power consumption) for a bit more performance, but most developers cannot devote resources to such a task Most developers will not be able to devote the resources to such a task.

If Qualcomm's steps are consistent with its story, that's not much of an issue, and the Snapdragon X Elite machines seem to run games only slightly worse, even without optimization. The company appears to have tested top Steam games and is confident enough in its results to suggest broad compatibility.

It is important to remember, however, that even when fully optimized, we still do not know how well the games will perform on the chipset. All we know from this is that the emulation will be close to native performance; we do not know if it will be good, bad, or even halfway there.

Nevertheless, this is an exciting development for gamers: you can play many games on Apple Silicon, both natively and via the Rosetta 2 translation layer, but performance is erratic.

Whether Qualcomm can take the fight to Apple should be known in the coming months. Sources told The Verge that unannounced versions of both the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 are expected to launch this chipset in May.