Reports say that Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series laptops offer poor performance in games
The first reviews of Qualcomm's first Snapdragon X Series laptops have been published. But things are looking less than impressive in the gaming department.
Microsoft has partnered with Qualcomm, granting the chip-maker an exclusivity deal for Copilot+ PC. Though laptops featuring the new Snapdragon X chipsets: the Snapdragon X Elite and the Snapdragon X Plus were revealed last month, the devices were under a review embargo. This was due to Microsoft's decision to postpone Recall. As Zac Bowden from Windows Central noted, the Redmond company had instructed its OEM partners to not ship review units to outlets until June 18th, until it removed Recall from the devices.
Now that the embargo has been lifted, reviews of the new Snapdragon X Series laptops are available on major blogs and YouTube channels. Here is a quick rundown of the chipset's technical specifications.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X key specs
- CPU: Qualcomm Oryon CPU 10 or 12 cores, up to 3.8GHz Multi-Thread, up to 4.3GHz Dual Core Boost, 42MB Total Cache
- GPU: Qualcomm Adreno, up to 4.6 TFLOPS
- NPU: Qualcomm Hexagon, 45 TOPS
- Memory: Up to 64GB LPDDR5x, 135 GB/s, 8448 MT/s, 8 Channels, Shared System Level Cache
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X is built on a 4nm process, and has up to 12 Oryon CPU cores clocked up to 3.8GHz (Multi-Thread) and can be boosted up to 4.3GHz. The SoC features an Adreno graphics processing unit capable of 4.6 Teraflops. Qualcomm has its own app called Adreno Control Panel, which will keep GPU drivers up-to-date, and automatically optimize game settings.
Reviewers are unimpressed by Snapdragon X gaming performance
That sounds impressive on paper, and real-world tests seem to suggest the same. Reviewers who tested the ASUS Vivobook S 15 say that the device has very good performance for day-to-day tasks, and an impressive battery life. The SoC could give Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Strix Point some good competition. But, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chipset seems to have fared poorly in gaming tests, according to benchmarks of various games that the reviewers played on the laptops. Notebookcheck compared the chipset with other ARM chips, and the Snapdragon X ranked lowest in the test.
Other reviewers have also pointed out that the Snapdragon X chipsets don't deliver optimal frame rates. Videocardz reports that Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 34 fps, while Baldur's Gate 3 ran at 35 fps at 1080p low graphics settings. And this seems to be the case even when upscaling technologies like AMD's FSR or Intel's XESS were used. Some games reportedly didn't run at all, but that's probably because of emulation issues on the ARM chipset. Another issue that reviewers highlighted was that some games were locked to a different resolution than the laptop's screen.
You could ask why use it for gaming, well, Qualcomm did market the chipset as a gaming chipset, saying that it "generates game-changing performance and efficiency". The company had even claimed that most Windows games should just work fine on devices powered by its ARM chipset.
Despite having a powerful NPU, the laptop cannot use it for Copilot+ PC, because it is not designed for on-device assistance. The app uses Microsoft's servers for providing online responses. Samsung launched the Galaxy Book4Edge a few days ago, and the Snapdragon X Elite powered laptop likely suffers from the same flaws in gaming performance like the other devices did.
On a sidenote, Microsoft is adding new features to Windows Recall, despite criticism from security experts who have questioned the privacy issues and risks that could arise due to the automatic-screenshot capturing system of the A.I. tool.
It is more of a GPU driver issue than games being run via x64 emulation. Even the games claimed by Qualcomm as supported struggles very bad. Also this may not be a gaming device but this poor performance raises the question will the productivity programs work well? There are many programs that rely on GPU acceleration.
Question is will everything be soldered & not user upgradeable like ram, wifi, ssd?
Lenovo computers are just impressive. Some weeks ago I saw a 12 years Lenovo with 4 CPU and 16 Gb of RAM working like an amazing charm. I am not surprised about the second place of Lenovo Ideapad at the chart above. Thanks for the article! :]
If the game are not ARM native, the it is obvious the emulation will cause issues.
So it is really dumb to talk about something that will be obvious, Cyberpunk is not a native ARM game nor Baldur’s gate.
It will get better when Game Engines make it easy to target ARM chipset, just like how many software already run in ARM, even my open source Firewall has offered ARM builds for months.
These people making these weird claims, could have tested ‘game’ performance by using ARM compatible browsers and playing a game there and using WebGL tests and all that to see how good or bad the performance is.
Games have too many technologies that make it complicate it to just Emulate, especially anti-cheating software.
So using normal exe games for a benchmark is really stupid, just use a browser and see how something like WebGL in ARM performs against x86-64 until games get native ARM support.
Also, you should stop mentioning unrelated crap in your news… nobody cares about recall, and that is only available for NPU users, which is not what most people will get anyway. Stick to the topic, instead of keep talking to the same FUD about a feature nobody complaining about it has even used.
Recall will not affect performance of games, but NPU processors can be used to improve gaming, so the push of NPU processors is what matters, if you and anyone can disable recall, then do it, but stop the talking about something and then jump to another useless topic only because you want trolls commenting about it.
The Security experts are just as ignorant as anyone about the feature. And turning it off or don’t enable it, is enough to make it work, if people don’t want ‘Recall to spy anything they do’ thats’ what you do with any technology, you don’t use it and move on. But not using it, not even having ever used it and complain about it is ridiculous.
You realise thats being emulated right? Most reports show the chip with around a -10% to -40% speed penality using the old Windows emulation. Newer emulation due later this year will improve that speed.
“You could ask why use it for gaming, well, Qualcomm did market the chipset as a gaming chipset, saying that it “generates game-changing performance and efficiency”
I don’t think you quite understand the term “game-changing”.
Unless that was a joke – in which case, I’m the idiot ;-)
Was the Snapdragon X ever intended to play modern 3D games at proper FPS levels? I thought the intention was to have a daily driver for roadies who needed good performance and all day plus battery life. I think it has accomplished what Qualcomm set out to do and then some. Gaming is somewhat going to fail on ARM mostly because most games have to run in X86 emulation anyway.
“Microsoft is adding new features to Windows Recall, despite criticism from security experts who have questioned the privacy issues and risks that could arise due to the automatic-screenshot capturing system of the A.I. tool.”
—
“All I want to say is that
They don’t really care about us
All I want to say is that
They don’t really care about us”
-MJ
I think if someone buys a snapdragon laptop, gaming is the last thing they want to do with it.