Qualcomm says most Windows games should “just work” on its unannounced Arm laptops
Qualcomm says most Windows games should “just work” on its unannounced Arm laptops
How well will they run, though?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Can Qualcomm replicate Apple’s feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years after its first attempts?
Here’s one incredibly promising sign it might: Qualcomm is telling game developers their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops — no porting required.
Qualcomm says it has Adreno GPU drivers for DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL and will also support DX9 and up to OpenGL 4.6 via mapping layers.
As you can see in the slide above, there are a few caveats: games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat drivers (which have been growing in popularity, though some players now fear hacks) won’t work under emulation.
For now, neither will games that use AVX instruction sets, where Khalil suggests developers use SIMDe to get a huge headstart on converting them to NEON code.
It’s important for Qualcomm to be able to offer existing games, senior director of product management Micah Knapp told me in a recent interview: “In the immediate, near, and not so near future, you have to provide a platform for what people already have.”
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When has anything "Windows" ever "just worked"?