Qualcomm announces that Snapdragon laptops to run PC games without porting to ARM
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Key notes
- Qualcomm’s new ARM laptops will run PC games using emulation, no porting needed.
- Developers can choose native ARM porting, hybrid emulation, or straight emulation for their games.
- Emulation focuses on speed, with minimal performance hit and GPU unaffected.
Qualcomm is making a new push to bring ARM-based laptops to the mainstream. At the Game Developers Conference, Qualcomm announced that upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops will be able to run x86/64 games at close to full speed using emulation. What does this mean? This means that gamers will be able to play their existing games on these new laptops without having to wait for developers to port them to ARM.
Qualcomm says that developers have three options for making their games work on ARM laptops:
- porting their titles to native ARM64,
- creating a hybrid ARM64EC app, or
- doing nothing and letting the emulation layer handle everything.
Emulation is a process that allows a computer to run software that was designed for a different processor. Qualcomm says that its emulation layer will be able to run most games at close to full speed, with only a slight performance hit when the code is being translated for the first time.
But. Games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat drivers or games that use AVX instruction sets will not work under emulation. However, Qualcomm says that it is working on solutions for these issues.
Qualcomm is confident that its new emulation layer will make ARM-based laptops a viable option for gamers. The company is currently testing all of the top games on Steam and is confident that most titles will work.
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