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Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops

LordOfChaos

LordOfChaos

Member
Game Porting Toolkit (and Whiskey) on macOS is pretty good, better than the current Windows x86 emulation for sure. Hopefully this new chip gets at least there.
 
twilo99

twilo99

Member
LordOfChaos said:
Game Porting Toolkit (and Whiskey) on macOS is pretty good, better than the current Windows x86 emulation for sure. Hopefully this new chip gets at least there.
Click to expand...

Right, Apple have done an outstanding job with Rosetta as well, but Microsoft have been struggling with this for a while now and I’m starting to think that it could be a limitation with Windows that they can’t fix..

Also, as far as I know Qualcomm’s own drivers haven’t been great historically.
 
LordOfChaos

LordOfChaos

Member
twilo99 said:
Right, Apple have done an outstanding job with Rosetta as well, but Microsoft have been struggling with this for a while now and I’m starting to think that it could be a limitation with Windows that they can’t fix..

Also, as far as I know Qualcomm’s own drivers haven’t been great historically.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's a fundamental Windows limit, it's more that Apple has an advantage in designing its own hardware and software together, the chip they made can and does accelerate emulation functions such as flipping its memory model to match when emulating x86 for better performance, so they were able to get there first and set the high target. We'll have to see if the X Elite gets to this level.
 
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Reallink

Reallink

Member
LOLNO. Even Intel GPUs on actual x86 systems don't "just work", ain't no way Failcom is going to produce both working drivers AND a fucking ARM translation layer on top of each other.
 
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M

mrBarrelNut

Member
Reallink said:
LOLNO. Even Intel GPUs on actual x86 systems don't "just work", ain't no way Failcom is going to produce both working drivers AND a fucking ARM translation layer on top of each other.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what you mean?

Windows on ARM has been able to run x86 programs for quite some time. And official Windows on ARM devices all use Qualcomm chips for now. For example, here is a video containing some gameplay from a year ago on lower powered Microsoft / Qualcomm SQ3 processor:



The new Snapdragon X Elite is much more powerful chip.
 
Reallink

Reallink

Member
mrBarrelNut said:
I'm not sure what you mean?

Windows on ARM has been able to run x86 programs for quite some time. And official Windows on ARM devices all use Qualcomm chips for now. For example, here is a video containing some gameplay from a year ago on lower powered Microsoft / Qualcomm SQ3 processor:



The new Snapdragon X Elite is much more powerful chip.
Click to expand...


I mean 2 variables is much worse than 1. There's going to be a compounding effect of bad drivers and ARM translation layer issues either sitting on top of each other, or alternating which is at fault from game to game. As I said, Intel's struggling to deal with 1 variable and has infinitely more Windows driver experience than Qualcomm by virtue of their multiple decades of iGPU work.
 
RaySoft

RaySoft

Member
The Snapdragon X Elite lies somewhere close to Apple's M3 chip i benchmarks. The Elite should be better at raytracing.
 
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Dirk Benedict

Dirk Benedict

Gold Member
Dazraell said:
This statement gave me Todd Howard "it just works" vibes
Click to expand...
maxresdefault.jpg
 
Hugare

Hugare

Member
Whitney Houston GIF


They said they were working on a x86 emulator some time ago, but nothing came out of it.

We with ARM devices are waiting
 
LordOfChaos

LordOfChaos

Member
Melon Husk said:
I would very much like a hybrid arm/x86 laptop.
Click to expand...

In what way exactly? Even within fully x86 laptops, they had to do things like disable AVX-512 on big cores on certain processors because the little cores didn't support it and they had to keep the ISA identical for thread switching

But they are making x86 laptops that essentially have an ARM tablet as a screen, but the two sides aren't really talking to each other apart from using both sets of speakers

 
Melon Husk

Melon Husk

Member
LordOfChaos said:
In what way exactly? Even within fully x86 laptops, they had to do things like disable AVX-512 on big cores on certain processors because the little cores didn't support it and they had to keep the ISA identical for thread switching

But they are making x86 laptops that essentially have an ARM tablet as a screen, but the two sides aren't really talking to each other apart from using both sets of speakers

Click to expand...

"One that works" I should have added. Arm and x86 on the same SoC. I want my operating system and office programs to use arm cores. For occasional higher performance the x86 cores should be available for short term bursts.
 
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LordOfChaos

LordOfChaos

Member
Melon Husk said:
"One that works" I should have added. Arm and x86 on the same SoC. I want my operating system and office programs to use arm cores. For occasional higher performance the x86 cores should be available for short term bursts.
Click to expand...
Yeah that would be interesting, but again given how fragile it currently is to where they can't even add x86 extensions to the big cores if there's a big/little mix that's going to be a complicated implementation
 
M1chl

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
mrBarrelNut said:
I'm not sure what you mean?

Windows on ARM has been able to run x86 programs for quite some time. And official Windows on ARM devices all use Qualcomm chips for now. For example, here is a video containing some gameplay from a year ago on lower powered Microsoft / Qualcomm SQ3 processor:



The new Snapdragon X Elite is much more powerful chip.
Click to expand...

That shit running Control is actually really impressive
 
Fbh

Fbh

Member
So out of pure ignorance.
As a consumer what would be the benefit of an ARM laptop? What would the main benefit be over a x86 laptop?
 
lefty1117

lefty1117

Gold Member
So what, the chips will have a built in emulation layer to handle x86 instruction set? It's some sort of "proton on other processor" (POOP) tech? I guess we can put up with POOP for a couple of years until we see direct hardware support. Linux gamers have been putting up with poop for a while now :)
 
twilo99

twilo99

Member
64bitmodels said:
Better battery life and less heat due to arm supposedly being more efficient.
Click to expand...

It’s say it’s rather factual at this point since we have the ARM based Apple notebooks and no x86 based machine can come close them in term of efficiency, at least with what we have on the market currently, I’m sure Intel is not siting idle either.
 
twilo99

twilo99

Member
Ozriel said:
nobody is excited about this purely for gaming laptops
Click to expand...

In terms of gaming and ARM the only exciting thing for me is handhelds..

Gaming laptops can have dedicated GPUs and can afford much higher power draw.

15-20W power draw gaming is where things get interesting.

Of course everyone here hates the xss, but it does deliver very good performance at around 70-80W but that’s still too high for a mobile device.

If we can get xss performance at ~25W … that’s a big win
 
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Kazekage1981

Kazekage1981

Member
Drew1440 said:
How long will it be before we get native AAA ARM games on Windows?
Click to expand...

Triple AAA native ARM games most likely in 2-3 years. This may be accelerated if AMD and NVIDIA make their own ARM based CPU/GPU/NPU/APU to compete with Qualcomm because they want to see their hardware shine, along with advancements in AI, DirectX12Ultimate, Visual Studio and game engines that convert x86 to native ARM.
 
twilo99

twilo99

Member
Drew1440 said:
How long will it be before we get native AAA ARM games on Windows?
Click to expand...

Probably a while unless Microsoft’s first party studios get tasked with making that happen sooner.

We could argue that it already happened with Resident Evil on Apples’s M2 chip, but I’m not sure if that’s considered a AAA title
 
O

Ozriel

M$FT
Cert.in.Death said:
Unless the initiative is gaming-driven, don’t buy the hype of a chipmaker whose main focus is on something else.
Click to expand...

Their main focus is on being the chipmaker powering tens of millions of Windows laptops and desktops. And that includes powering some of the most popular use cases for the OS.

Anyone who thinks they aren’t serious about support for Steam/PC gaming seriously has to be in La La land.
Whether or not they stick the landing is a different discussion entirely.
 
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