Developers will have three options
Laptops based on the Qualcomm SoC of the Snapdragon X Elite line should appear on the market this summer. The first tests show that in terms of processor performance, at least in these very tests, the top platform of the line is very good. Now Qualcomm says games will run on the Snapdragon X Elite too.
More precisely, a company representative said that most games will run on Snapdragon X Elite. Here, of course, we are not talking about GPU performance, about which we still don’t really know anything, but about the technical side. Since we're talking about the Arm platform, running software built for x86-bit architecture requires certain manipulations. Qualcomm says game developers will have three options to choose from.
Firstly, they can port their games to ARM64 to achieve the best CPU performance and power consumption. Of course, no one will do this for the sake of laptops on Snapdragon X Elite at first.
Second, developers can create a hybrid ARM64EC application where Windows, its libraries, and Qualcomm drivers run natively, but the rest of the application is emulated to achieve near-native performance. This also requires additional actions from developers. But the third option is that developers can do practically nothing, and their games should still work, but using x64 emulation. It is not yet known how much performance will suffer. Let us remind you that the problem is that Snapdragon X Elite does not support discrete video cards, that is, in any case, it relies only on its own GPU.