I can't say I necessarily agree that the GPU is the obvious factor especially based on the difference in performance with CS:GO and cyberpunk. I'm thinking it's more of an optimization issue regarding the underlying x86 emulation. Out of all of those games CS:GO should have been the smoothest and easiest to run. Even the behavior of Doom points towards some sort of possible problem with it recompiling for the graphics. I suspect as another commenter mentioned a lot of this could be solved with optimization but the question is when will we see those optimizations and will they actually take the time?
while it is disappointing that the integrated graphics aren't strong enough for gaming, I think Qualcomm and Microsoft hit on the fundamentals for this transition. battery life, webcam quality, and screen quality are all good or above average. glad they focused on that first. here's hoping next gen arm chips are more competitive on the gaming side
while i agree with you keep in mind that we making comparisons of battery life, webcam quality, and screen quality with the previous offering of Amd and Intel, that all have for example 2023 quality screens. Without considering battery or cpu efficiency, the web cam quality and screen quality and other elements of upcoming x86 laptops will also feature 2024 quality components. Outside of that I am not sure how much more battery life Arm will have when competing with the upcoming cpus from intel and amd coming in the next 2 months. So in the end what will matter is the comparison of arm2024 vs x86-2024 and x86 will have the advantage of not needing any type of emulation or translation layer.
@@Solrac-Siul That's definetly true, next gen seem to be great, especially Lunar Leak in the performance per watt department. just wanted to say specifically on the webcam part, in theory qualcomm should straight up have an advantage here even compared with next gen. They have a different camera system, where the camera is directly connected to the CPU, or something like that, I don't quite recall. It's essentially like a smartphone. Intel/AMD don't do that (maybe eventually), not even on the next gen as far as I know
From what I’ve seen the Adreno Gpu is actually quite capable. It’s just evident that when it came to prism Microsoft never prioritized making good gpu emulation. On arm optimized gpu benchmarks the adreno does very well, on par with Intel and amd igpus
@@tanujrana8490Comparable to Radeon 680M and intel Arc on the Core Ultra 9 without overclocking Radeon 680M can be boosted beyond it's stock clocks so that's not a fair comparison Adreno actually wins in terms of efficiency
"GPU emulation" is not a thing here. The GPU architecture is unrelated to concerns of ARM vs x86. If there's a pathological case about x86 emulation with regards to the graphics stack that would cause this stuttering, I haven't heard of it. Apps don't care about the GPU architecture, they speak a dialect (Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan) that the GPU drivers can understand and turn into device-specific GPU commands. To my knowledge, Qualcomm doesn't use translation layers for Direct3D/Vulkan here, so it's all native drivers for the examples shown. This doesn't exclude drivers as a possible cause for stutters. It could be some parts of the driver being pathologically slow, or that the hardware has constraints that makes it hard for the driver to be fast in such cases, etc. It could also reasonably be explained by x86 emulation being slow or blocking in some cases (but probably not specifically in the graphics stack, which I'd guess is mostly native ARM, even when in an x86 app). It's a reasonable guess IMO but I'm not sure why stutters would be that brutal. Some games fail to run because of the anticheat, but some fail to run or get artifacts likely because of driver bugs (for which only the driver is to blame).
That being said, I couldn't tell you the exact specifics, but historically mobile chips have been dealing with different performance tradeoffs than desktop chips due to power and size reasons (tiled architecture, memory bandwidth tradeoffs and whatnot). Benchmarks/games designed and optimized with this kind of mobile GPU in mind, even if they used the same APIs, could reasonably show the adreno GPU be more competitive. But that doesn't have to do with some form of emulation, and would be more about overall performance than huge stutters.
To little to late, This 1400$ laptop wasn't ready and was a disappointment before it was even released and soon it will be stomped into the ground, Sound the worlds smallest violin
Mobile GPUs have fundamental architectural differences from desktop GPUs that are likely the explanation. It performs well in benchmarks dedicated to mobile GPUs, it falls short of Intel and AMD's offerings in desktop benchmarks.
They do provide horsepower though? Are they the best GPU's? No. They're not meant to be. Could they be better in some things? Yeah they could, but people are pretending like theyre the most expensive laptops in the world while having the performance of a Raspberry Pi. These are new computers, and they offer very good battery life, as well as CPU power, while still having a "good enough" GPU (Honestly, the GPU is around what intel ARC is, which is very good). People forget that not only are these laptops new, they also are well built. Sure you can find cheaper PC's, but you can find really good snapdragon laptops with oled, 120hz, good battery life, good camera, while still having very solid and snappy performance while still being around the same price as competing x86 laptops.
It's clear with GTA, Witcher and Cyberpunk performance that the problems are the drivers/emulation layer. It should be able to be improved if Qualcomm sticks to it.
Good review - it's the first one where you spanned most of the popular games 2020-2024. Most reviews just mention what worked, none told us that 50% of common titles wont start and another 25% run at 20 fps ...
I have a Windows Dev Kit 2023 and been using daily for 16 months. This has a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor, so around 50% of the performance of an X Elite processor. Though I agree with your gaming assessment, I have seen significant improvements in both emulation and graphic driver performance, especially on Windows 11 24H2, such that I can play many more games than when I first got the Dev Kit. Typically, indie style or less demand games with directX 11 support, such as Spelunky / Spelunky 2, Tomb Raider I - III Remastered, Kentucky Route Zero, the recent "Beyond a Steel Sky", DREDGE, Songs of Conquest, Disco Elysium, Duck Detective, Cuphead, Witcher 3 and Genshin Impact. Sometimes the games would not open or repeatedly crash unless I configured the display to be a borderless window rather than full screen. What does work well in retro game emulation. Dolphin, athersx2, ppsspp, Duckstation, and DosBox-x all have native windows arm64 versions, and RMG - N64, mGBA, ScummVM, OpenMW - Elderscroll III Morrowind, all run well via x86/x64 emulation.
Synthetic benchmarks made this seem like its iGPU would be on par with iGPUs from Intel, AMD, and Apple. Even Apple's "game porting toolkit", which uses Rosetta 2 and a wine+D3DMetal translation layer, seemed to perform quite a bit better than this. So one can only hope this is a problem with drivers. That's what made Intel Arc GPUs so bad at launch, and they got a lot better over time.
I don't think Qualcomm Adreno can compete with Apple GPU at least in driver stack performance. Windows users will have to wait for 2025 Nvidia new ARM + Blackwell APU to win over everyone including Apple. If you want a gaming laptop that can game on battery, wait for Nvidia.
@@JohnWilliams-gy5ycThere's also AMD's Strix Halo APU. I don't know what the Blackwell APU specs will be (probably stronger in GPU performance) but AMD's offering looks interesting for both combined Performance and obviously compatibility. I just wish it wasn't delayed so much and would be available around this time.
Good video checking the reality. ARM still needs to catch up in the emulation game or gain enough user base to get relevant so devs will have incentive to make arm builds.
It can be happening. Snapdragon and Samsung have enough finances to spread these technologies if they want to and it looks like they're going to do it.
I really, really want it just for the battery life and power consumption. But so far it seems I'll have to wait for egpu support before I'll consider buying it. 💔 Edit: Hopefully they'll have it fixed by the time of black Friday.
saw something where touching the screen, improved performance, its like these things drop settings then boost when it registers screen contact like a phone. I would say this thing needs software tweaking
I dont really think ARM is much more efficient than x86. Its really just been blown out of proportion by Intel's homogeneous 14++++nm being compared to M1 on TSMC's 5nm with Big.Little. Now with node and architecture parity, it's probably not enough in it to justify all the ARM issues
ARM is way more efficient, the reason hyperscalers have moved to/are moving to ARM is because of it. It's less obvious on a laptop than it is when you have a few thousand cores in a datacenter but even then MAC's have already shown that ARM is way more efficient.
ARM is very2 efficient. x86 and x64 is an old architecture from 70's, and the only reason why they still holds up until now is because almost every apps are designed to run on them. and by 50+ years of development, u can imagine how bloated it is with old + new instructions are merged. ARM actually an old architecture too, but they're very flexible compared to x86. today's modern ARM are simplified architecture version, it eliminates old2 instructions from x86 and x64 that are not relevant to today's modern apps. and by today's terms, it is an SoC, meaning CPU, GPU and even memory all in one place that makes the SoC itself can control everything to make it more efficient
@@nadtz Well yes, on an exascale 2 cents is worth millions. But I mean for personal use, I believe 10-15% difference in battery life is much less noticeable than errors and crashes.
@@spoots1234 Depending on where in the world you are how much power costs can vary greatly, just ask people in Europe. And while I'm no Apple fan Apple has pretty convincingly shown well implemented ARM is a lot more efficient than 10-15%, at least compared to current X86 (and especially while on battery). That might change with Lunar Lake and coming AMD offerings but comparing apples to apples it's pretty clear there is a place for ARM is MS can get developers to support it.
What was helping Apple? This arm transition was best for them,almost no game available for Mac... For windows arm is the future, but will take 12-24 months to see the full potential of Snapdragon Elite... First always pay more ..
When M1 came out, there were no games. It took like 2 years till we saw RE Village running natively. I have a feeling itll be the same with copilot...unless they trash it early.
I Agree. Adreno GPU isn't even comparable in today's standards. The Snapdragon X Elite Adreno GPU came from the SD 8gen2 GPU which they scale up from a very low power Mobile GPU. That simply explains why it performed badly compared to Intel Arc/Xe or AMD Radeon or Apple M-Series GPU. I hope in the next gen of Qualcomm PC SoC, they will fully redesign a GPU that is specifically for PC not scaling up a mobile GPU.
Arm based Windows PCs are going to flop. As it is, companies already don't want to write code for AMD, Nvidia, Intel, AND Apple. Now they're being asked to code for ARM on Windows as well and very few people have or will buy them. They're super expensive and less capable. These are for people that buy Microsoft surface computers and those already don't sell very well due to their high price point. Then you throw in that they suck at gaming and you're left with a laptop that very few people actually want to buy. Why would companies want to spend time and money coding and maintaining programs for ARM on Windows? Where's the profit in doing this? Just get an AMD laptop and call it a day. Then you'll get performance in all areas as well as compatibility.
Honestly, I just brought my wife a new laptop (A Dell 2 in 1 with touch screen) just before the Snapdragon one's became available in Australia as her previous Dell 2 in 1 she has had for 6 years died. With what I am seeing with compatibility issues, I still think I would have made the choice I did for her. I chose AMD over Intel for a few reasons, the first being about 2 hours longer battery life, the on board graphics was significantly better, they both had similar single threaded and multicore performance, but the AMD was $600 AUD cheaper. I think if Snapdragon can make these a cheaper laptop (which is where I figure ARM will land) but with decent performance, battery life and compatibility then more people will buy them. I could even see schools consider changing from Chromebooks if the systems can be made cheap enough whilst still having reasonable performance.
All the games I care about playing, perform well... That's all I cared about and was I went for the Surface laptop 7.... Wasn't about to overpay for a MacBook Pro, in-order to get the battery life.
You do know that Microsoft is spying on you anyways? Windows is always doing that, and to offer a chrome book as an alternative? Really? CHROME? you know, from GOOGLE, the LATGEST DATA HARVASTER ON THE PLANET
This in not meant for gaming. Why test gaming on a machine not meant for it. This is just stupid. It's like i give you a city car and you go on a dirt track and say how much that car sucks. Also if you want to game use gf now or other game streaming service.
You reviewers are so biased to the extend that its heartening. I am on the Apple Ecosystem ( Iphone, Macbook, IMAC, Apple watch etc) . Non of these “M” chips are actually optimized for intense gaming cause they are on ARM, even though apple has been building ARM systems for The past 4 years. Windows comes in with snapdragon x elite and hell breaks loose, benchmarking it with a gaming pc , whiles ARMS aren’t yet optimized for intensive gaming yet. This is their first Generation CPU and ARM architectures for windows, yet most Reviewers compare it to Macbook pro M3 and others.
I'm assuming the higher tier variants will be put into Mini PCs. Either, way, this is a very disappointing show out and launch for the X Elite, at least when it comes to gaming. Hopefully when Prism and Drivers improve, maybe it'll be a viable chip. I kind of doubt it though if they're going to price machines using it above $1K USD though. Maybe it'll be a decent video editing/streaming chip when the time comes.
This is not just about optimising games for ARM, but mostly on Adreno GPU as well.. So qualcomm needs 2x effort over what intel did on optimising ARC gpus for 2 years
People defending this saying its emulation or driver, what do you think if you want to play games or anything that x86 already does better ,will you just be like " Oh its the emulation, I guess i wont do this then "
also software evolves constantly. but there's some catching up to do as with this new hardware architecture a lot of software needs to be rewritten and rebuilt so it works on these CPUs. the emulation layer is just there for a smoother transitioning and legacy applications that don't need top end performance.
it literally isn't though. it's slightly faster than M1, based on geekbench 6 benchmarks, which btw is already incredibly high performance. we don't need more on the CPU side really. and that with incredible efficiency.
And as you said. Are you buying promises or real product. Qualcomm themselves clearly stated that the device is NOT a gaming product... I don't know what "not that great" battery efficiency is when it's going like for like and in some tests that I have seen outlast the macbook m3's in some battery life tests. I'd never recommend buying a 1st gen product and probably never will. As for because of the price, will you buy a MayBach and expect it to go number one on the track because of the price?
Microsoft is to blame for at least half the disappointment here. The failed to include interesting Ai features by the release of these Elite chips, they failed to include competent emulation, they failed to polish Qualcomm's drivers for Windows 11 and the state of Windows 11 as a whole is a complete mess with its "updates" breaking most older systems so for newer hardware is even worst
Question, the games that you were able to run were they actually optimized for that particular chipset? If not, that answers your question on why those games ran like crap.
just graphics driver problems together with x86 emulation. noone really expected that to be smooth from the get go. things will get better just give it time.
So it is not a gaming chip good to know. I hope they are not marketing it as such. Right now I think it is going through the pain of the CPU architecture shift process. For me i really do not care which one wins. x86, ARM, or RISC-V for windows does run on all 3 of them it runs best on ARM but programs for windows run best on x86. For RISC-V well it can run and for programs it is still at the stage of you compile it yourself for most programs. I think Qualcomm was smart being the first ARM chip in a windows computer even though the GPU is still a mobile GPU with mobile GPU performance. What i am wondering is if AMD, Intel and/or nVidia will allow laptop makers to use their GPU in a laptop design with a ARM chip.
Qualcomm literally said its chips were not designed for gaming and yet certain youtubers just can't get over themselves as if everyone plays games. Nonsense.
Blame the regular ppl too for wanting this . These idiots don't realize it's essentially just competitor to macbook which is also not for gaming (only for efficiency to performance)
Exactly. These are not really gaming laptops. The purpose of these laptops is to create alternative apple experience in battery performance and hopefully it will get better with video editing and content creation with software support getting better.
so this is the new, "brand new" X-elite that they said run the same as m3 silicon performance..the best chip ever ...i am for sure gonna buy it...then run half life and just watch it stutter n i hope it will upgrade to seizure as well yeayyy
look. the stutters are a driver issue so it's expected they will be fixed. besides that though, gpu isn't quite at the level it should be so there's hoping they will sort that out. but what you get is already incredible CPU performance, as in, on par with high end desktop CPUs, which translates to a great multitasking experience, and just using them for regular usage. plus you get absolutely incredible battery life. i'm talking BETTER battery life then what you get from your phone. clearly there's a lot of potential here and this is absolutely going to be the future of computing.
@@EJM07 bro i domt know i could only partially agree to what u typed....apart from improving battery life still does'nt show any significant or mildly changes...
@@padukajebat8084 true, they’ve made an awful entry with this. It’s unfortunate but these first generation of laptops should probably be treated more like a dev kit than a real product for now.
Prolly the whole architecture needs some time to mature, just like intel ARC. After all, all games are made with x86 instructions in mind and not ARM64. Give it time. I'm sure they'll manage.
Can ppl stop saying that CS runs on a potato? even CSGO was relatively "hard" to run before turning into CS2, which is a way more demanding game now, sure you don't need the absolute best hardware for an enjoyable experience but def shouldn't be compared with CSGO
@@davidpodeszwa7010yes there are box86/64 dose that. But seeing as there is no official support till 6.11 and a lot of these laptops are locked down getting Linux on the might be hard.
LOL I knew it. ARM is *not* the future. This is gonna take many months if not years of improvements and by the time they get there, the energy efficiency of x86 would match if not exceed these ARM devices. We already have the Steam Deck being able to underclock to use just 5 watts and still play a lot of games. Why do we need ARM for the so-called "efficiency"? Protip: we dont
@@crysed7897They been at it for years. Qualcomm has been working on this since Windows RT days. The main issue of Adreno on windows is that everything is on a wrapper to dx12, even the dx 11 support is through a wrapper.
Well its not the future because this is Microsoft we are talking. But we have examples of efficiency in ARM, you are using it on your phone at this very moment. And Apple also did show it can be done too Heck even Raytracing is becoming possible with these chips for a while now.. The problem has always been Microsoft and a bit of Qualcomm screwing it up. Microsoft don't have the team to pull it of for their software suit it seems.
I can imagine what an M4 max 16in laptop will run light in low power mode. I bet it’ll run natively run games pretty well. I can imagine it’ll be AMD’s new strix GPU laptops that’ll be trading blows with the M4 max the latter half of the year.
Stop calling it playable when you need to run a game at 720p lol. Not even my kids would accept 720p. Also the lack of proper AVX support is an obvious game breaker for a huge portion of x86 games. Only native ARM games have any hope
arm really is the future though. the cpu side of this whole x elite soc is *on par* with high end enthusiast level *desktop cpus* at the fraction of the power consumption. just let that sink in. they just need to get the gpus on the same level and we will have high end desktop performance in mobile devices....
I'm surprised you wasted your time testing these. I wouldn't expect any decent game to run on arm emulation. These PCs will be okay for surfing the web or Excel/word spreadsheets. Great battery life. And as people make arm programs they will work fine. But running a resource intensive game on these is in no no.
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I can't say I necessarily agree that the GPU is the obvious factor especially based on the difference in performance with CS:GO and cyberpunk.
I'm thinking it's more of an optimization issue regarding the underlying x86 emulation.
Out of all of those games CS:GO should have been the smoothest and easiest to run.
Even the behavior of Doom points towards some sort of possible problem with it recompiling for the graphics.
I suspect as another commenter mentioned a lot of this could be solved with optimization but the question is when will we see those optimizations and will they actually take the time?
Yeah, doom eternal has an issue with Vulcan on the snapdragon. It’s drivers that need to be updated
The games would need to be recompiled
@@Dave102693 not the emulation and drivers just need to improve. In a perfect world they’d be recompiled though
@@christianr.5868yeah hopefully proton can get a good experience later on, because Linux ports for snapdragon x are already in the works
😂🤣 dude the GPU is still no where near what AMD and Nvidia are doing.
surely game devs will start developing and optimizing for ARM right..?
(no, they wont)
I mean people said that for Linux for years. Arguably just need a better emulation layer just like proton did.
@@Aygross maybe wait until gaben decided steam deck go arm in x elite 2 or 3.
@@Aygrossproton doesn't emulate games, it just translates system calls so there is just slight perfomance hit.
Well Microsoft owns a huge chunk of the gaming industry, including CoD, so they can port their games to arm
@@Randomness662 also, they’ve already been rewriting their games for arm with the switch. And the switch 2 will get even more support
while it is disappointing that the integrated graphics aren't strong enough for gaming, I think Qualcomm and Microsoft hit on the fundamentals for this transition. battery life, webcam quality, and screen quality are all good or above average. glad they focused on that first. here's hoping next gen arm chips are more competitive on the gaming side
Will be a big game changer if they will support dedicated GPUs
while i agree with you keep in mind that we making comparisons of battery life, webcam quality, and screen quality with the previous offering of Amd and Intel, that all have for example 2023 quality screens.
Without considering battery or cpu efficiency, the web cam quality and screen quality and other elements of upcoming x86 laptops will also feature 2024 quality components. Outside of that I am not sure how much more battery life Arm will have when competing with the upcoming cpus from intel and amd coming in the next 2 months. So in the end what will matter is the comparison of arm2024 vs x86-2024 and x86 will have the advantage of not needing any type of emulation or translation layer.
@@Solrac-Siul fair point!
@@Workaholic42 looks like they will eventually - the chips have enough PCI-e lanes to support a dedicated GPU
@@Solrac-Siul That's definetly true, next gen seem to be great, especially Lunar Leak in the performance per watt department.
just wanted to say specifically on the webcam part, in theory qualcomm should straight up have an advantage here even compared with next gen. They have a different camera system, where the camera is directly connected to the CPU, or something like that, I don't quite recall. It's essentially like a smartphone. Intel/AMD don't do that (maybe eventually), not even on the next gen as far as I know
From what I’ve seen the Adreno Gpu is actually quite capable. It’s just evident that when it came to prism Microsoft never prioritized making good gpu emulation. On arm optimized gpu benchmarks the adreno does very well, on par with Intel and amd igpus
This
Comparable performance to amd and intel igpus.
That narrows it down very little.
@@tanujrana8490Comparable to Radeon 680M and intel Arc on the Core Ultra 9 without overclocking
Radeon 680M can be boosted beyond it's stock clocks so that's not a fair comparison
Adreno actually wins in terms of efficiency
"GPU emulation" is not a thing here. The GPU architecture is unrelated to concerns of ARM vs x86.
If there's a pathological case about x86 emulation with regards to the graphics stack that would cause this stuttering, I haven't heard of it.
Apps don't care about the GPU architecture, they speak a dialect (Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan) that the GPU drivers can understand and turn into device-specific GPU commands.
To my knowledge, Qualcomm doesn't use translation layers for Direct3D/Vulkan here, so it's all native drivers for the examples shown.
This doesn't exclude drivers as a possible cause for stutters. It could be some parts of the driver being pathologically slow, or that the hardware has constraints that makes it hard for the driver to be fast in such cases, etc.
It could also reasonably be explained by x86 emulation being slow or blocking in some cases (but probably not specifically in the graphics stack, which I'd guess is mostly native ARM, even when in an x86 app). It's a reasonable guess IMO but I'm not sure why stutters would be that brutal.
Some games fail to run because of the anticheat, but some fail to run or get artifacts likely because of driver bugs (for which only the driver is to blame).
That being said, I couldn't tell you the exact specifics, but historically mobile chips have been dealing with different performance tradeoffs than desktop chips due to power and size reasons (tiled architecture, memory bandwidth tradeoffs and whatnot). Benchmarks/games designed and optimized with this kind of mobile GPU in mind, even if they used the same APIs, could reasonably show the adreno GPU be more competitive. But that doesn't have to do with some form of emulation, and would be more about overall performance than huge stutters.
The GPU should be alright, considering a lot of amazing looking game on Android.
We might need wait a bit for the GPU drives and Prism update..
Yeah the games weren't made for Arm totally agree.
To little to late, This 1400$ laptop wasn't ready and was a disappointment before it was even released and soon it will be stomped into the ground, Sound the worlds smallest violin
Mobile GPUs have fundamental architectural differences from desktop GPUs that are likely the explanation. It performs well in benchmarks dedicated to mobile GPUs, it falls short of Intel and AMD's offerings in desktop benchmarks.
For this to cost 1400 and not provide any sort of actual horsepower is beyond stupid and insulting.
what you expect from *ARM based laptop*? also , this is pretty much not design for games lol
@@zenithowo Well for starter we expected it to be a fair price given how arm on phone can be just as cost saving. But I guess Qualcomm tax it greatly?
To clarify, it badly lacks GPU horsepower. The CPU is quite capable, just useless for gaming.
@@Deliveredmean42 i get what you mean yeah, but with them baking drivers in the future might get better but yeah that price doesn't justify it
They do provide horsepower though? Are they the best GPU's? No. They're not meant to be. Could they be better in some things? Yeah they could, but people are pretending like theyre the most expensive laptops in the world while having the performance of a Raspberry Pi. These are new computers, and they offer very good battery life, as well as CPU power, while still having a "good enough" GPU (Honestly, the GPU is around what intel ARC is, which is very good). People forget that not only are these laptops new, they also are well built. Sure you can find cheaper PC's, but you can find really good snapdragon laptops with oled, 120hz, good battery life, good camera, while still having very solid and snappy performance while still being around the same price as competing x86 laptops.
Crazy that companies think we want them watching us all the time taking pictures of our desktop.
It's clear with GTA, Witcher and Cyberpunk performance that the problems are the drivers/emulation layer. It should be able to be improved if Qualcomm sticks to it.
exactly. there's a lot on the table here.
Good review - it's the first one where you spanned most of the popular games 2020-2024. Most reviews just mention what worked, none told us that 50% of common titles wont start and another 25% run at 20 fps ...
I have a Windows Dev Kit 2023 and been using daily for 16 months. This has a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor, so around 50% of the performance of an X Elite processor. Though I agree with your gaming assessment, I have seen significant improvements in both emulation and graphic driver performance, especially on Windows 11 24H2, such that I can play many more games than when I first got the Dev Kit. Typically, indie style or less demand games with directX 11 support, such as Spelunky / Spelunky 2, Tomb Raider I - III Remastered, Kentucky Route Zero, the recent "Beyond a Steel Sky", DREDGE, Songs of Conquest, Disco Elysium, Duck Detective, Cuphead, Witcher 3 and Genshin Impact. Sometimes the games would not open or repeatedly crash unless I configured the display to be a borderless window rather than full screen. What does work well in retro game emulation. Dolphin, athersx2, ppsspp, Duckstation, and DosBox-x all have native windows arm64 versions, and RMG - N64, mGBA, ScummVM, OpenMW - Elderscroll III Morrowind, all run well via x86/x64 emulation.
Sub-par performance at a premium price? Are they trying to be Apple pre-M1?
Thank god at least someone is covering this
Synthetic benchmarks made this seem like its iGPU would be on par with iGPUs from Intel, AMD, and Apple. Even Apple's "game porting toolkit", which uses Rosetta 2 and a wine+D3DMetal translation layer, seemed to perform quite a bit better than this. So one can only hope this is a problem with drivers. That's what made Intel Arc GPUs so bad at launch, and they got a lot better over time.
Benchmarks indicate the GPU is no better than Vega8 (2021) - a 1080 esports gpu (AMD 5700g). Sorry, but driver updates won't help.
@@systemBuilderI mean we're talking iGPUs here. That's basically where AMD, Intel, and Apple are all at.
I don't think Qualcomm Adreno can compete with Apple GPU at least in driver stack performance. Windows users will have to wait for 2025 Nvidia new ARM + Blackwell APU to win over everyone including Apple. If you want a gaming laptop that can game on battery, wait for Nvidia.
@@JohnWilliams-gy5ycThere's also AMD's Strix Halo APU. I don't know what the Blackwell APU specs will be (probably stronger in GPU performance) but AMD's offering looks interesting for both combined Performance and obviously compatibility.
I just wish it wasn't delayed so much and would be available around this time.
I've needed to see this for a long time
wait wait wait... you forgot *the* killer game.... solitaire!! :P
Good video checking the reality. ARM still needs to catch up in the emulation game or gain enough user base to get relevant so devs will have incentive to make arm builds.
It can be happening. Snapdragon and Samsung have enough finances to spread these technologies if they want to and it looks like they're going to do it.
I really, really want it just for the battery life and power consumption. But so far it seems I'll have to wait for egpu support before I'll consider buying it. 💔
Edit: Hopefully they'll have it fixed by the time of black Friday.
Follow up video is needed. I know some of the numbers from the 780m AMD. 90 FPS is not good result in GTA5 on those settings iirc.
saw something where touching the screen, improved performance, its like these things drop settings then boost when it registers screen contact like a phone. I would say this thing needs software tweaking
I have a surface pro 11 and have seen gpu usage being quite low during gaming, i would expect it to improve with better drivers.
Of course I'm interested in a follow up video DUH
I dont really think ARM is much more efficient than x86. Its really just been blown out of proportion by Intel's homogeneous 14++++nm being compared to M1 on TSMC's 5nm with Big.Little. Now with node and architecture parity, it's probably not enough in it to justify all the ARM issues
ARM is way more efficient, the reason hyperscalers have moved to/are moving to ARM is because of it. It's less obvious on a laptop than it is when you have a few thousand cores in a datacenter but even then MAC's have already shown that ARM is way more efficient.
ARM is very2 efficient. x86 and x64 is an old architecture from 70's, and the only reason why they still holds up until now is because almost every apps are designed to run on them. and by 50+ years of development, u can imagine how bloated it is with old + new instructions are merged. ARM actually an old architecture too, but they're very flexible compared to x86. today's modern ARM are simplified architecture version, it eliminates old2 instructions from x86 and x64 that are not relevant to today's modern apps. and by today's terms, it is an SoC, meaning CPU, GPU and even memory all in one place that makes the SoC itself can control everything to make it more efficient
Bruh 😶
@@nadtz Well yes, on an exascale 2 cents is worth millions. But I mean for personal use, I believe 10-15% difference in battery life is much less noticeable than errors and crashes.
@@spoots1234 Depending on where in the world you are how much power costs can vary greatly, just ask people in Europe. And while I'm no Apple fan Apple has pretty convincingly shown well implemented ARM is a lot more efficient than 10-15%, at least compared to current X86 (and especially while on battery). That might change with Lunar Lake and coming AMD offerings but comparing apples to apples it's pretty clear there is a place for ARM is MS can get developers to support it.
Who would have guessed that Windows ARM would have had compatibility issues
What was helping Apple? This arm transition was best for them,almost no game available for Mac... For windows arm is the future, but will take 12-24 months to see the full potential of Snapdragon Elite... First always pay more ..
When M1 came out, there were no games. It took like 2 years till we saw RE Village running natively. I have a feeling itll be the same with copilot...unless they trash it early.
I Agree. Adreno GPU isn't even comparable in today's standards. The Snapdragon X Elite Adreno GPU came from the SD 8gen2 GPU which they scale up from a very low power Mobile GPU. That simply explains why it performed badly compared to Intel Arc/Xe or AMD Radeon or Apple M-Series GPU. I hope in the next gen of Qualcomm PC SoC, they will fully redesign a GPU that is specifically for PC not scaling up a mobile GPU.
Loved those doom glitches..looked kinda cool
I'm afraid running windows x86 games on macos m1 is better than this....
are you using MSI afterburner? (i'm not good at differentiating all monitoring software)
but I saw "ETA prime" having issues when using afterburner
"you can play linux games on the steam deck" yes, but you can also play (most) windows games through proton. It's a surprisingly good experience.
These are the first generation of its kind, give it time
Arm based Windows PCs are going to flop. As it is, companies already don't want to write code for AMD, Nvidia, Intel, AND Apple. Now they're being asked to code for ARM on Windows as well and very few people have or will buy them. They're super expensive and less capable. These are for people that buy Microsoft surface computers and those already don't sell very well due to their high price point. Then you throw in that they suck at gaming and you're left with a laptop that very few people actually want to buy. Why would companies want to spend time and money coding and maintaining programs for ARM on Windows? Where's the profit in doing this? Just get an AMD laptop and call it a day. Then you'll get performance in all areas as well as compatibility.
Honestly, I just brought my wife a new laptop (A Dell 2 in 1 with touch screen) just before the Snapdragon one's became available in Australia as her previous Dell 2 in 1 she has had for 6 years died. With what I am seeing with compatibility issues, I still think I would have made the choice I did for her. I chose AMD over Intel for a few reasons, the first being about 2 hours longer battery life, the on board graphics was significantly better, they both had similar single threaded and multicore performance, but the AMD was $600 AUD cheaper.
I think if Snapdragon can make these a cheaper laptop (which is where I figure ARM will land) but with decent performance, battery life and compatibility then more people will buy them. I could even see schools consider changing from Chromebooks if the systems can be made cheap enough whilst still having reasonable performance.
if you come for the king, you best not miss....this missed
All the games I care about playing, perform well... That's all I cared about and was I went for the Surface laptop 7.... Wasn't about to overpay for a MacBook Pro, in-order to get the battery life.
Kinda sad. The CPU competes with the M2(and sortof M3). They should've co-oped with AMD to bring their Radeon igpu over.
Paying 1400$ to be spied on while barely being able to play any games is crazy, either get a Chromebook or a real pc.
Brilliant take
Honestly I’d get a macbook. Way better graphics and the way you can get loads of games working on them is so cool.
You do know that Microsoft is spying on you anyways? Windows is always doing that, and to offer a chrome book as an alternative? Really? CHROME? you know, from GOOGLE, the LATGEST DATA HARVASTER ON THE PLANET
@a-alex-p7033 You would get a MacBook for better graphics and compatibility?
@@LAMG059 Not for only that. But theyre a nice bonus! Current Macbooks are amazing
Guess whats its very recently introduced so even though the gpu is very powerful and high end without optimization it would be stuttering ,lags etc.
well some reviews showed that theirs not much difference between 1080p and 720p gaming performance so i guess it will get better
Made me so mad to get three months free of Xbox game pass and couldn't even use it unless I wanted their crappy cloud gaming. Terrible experience
Winlator on Snapdragon Gen 3 vs Snapdragon X Elite. Would love to see this
This in not meant for gaming. Why test gaming on a machine not meant for it. This is just stupid. It's like i give you a city car and you go on a dirt track and say how much that car sucks. Also if you want to game use gf now or other game streaming service.
You reviewers are so biased to the extend that its heartening. I am on the Apple Ecosystem ( Iphone, Macbook, IMAC, Apple watch etc) . Non of these “M” chips are actually optimized for intense gaming cause they are on ARM, even though apple has been building ARM
systems for
The past 4 years. Windows comes in with snapdragon x elite and hell breaks loose, benchmarking it with a gaming pc , whiles ARMS aren’t yet optimized for intensive gaming yet. This is their first Generation CPU and ARM architectures for windows, yet most
Reviewers compare it to Macbook pro M3 and others.
I wonder who absolutely needs a fast android system with subpar X86 performance in a total package?
Does this person even exist?
I'm assuming the higher tier variants will be put into Mini PCs. Either, way, this is a very disappointing show out and launch for the X Elite, at least when it comes to gaming. Hopefully when Prism and Drivers improve, maybe it'll be a viable chip. I kind of doubt it though if they're going to price machines using it above $1K USD though.
Maybe it'll be a decent video editing/streaming chip when the time comes.
7 months deep into the year they had so much time to knock this baseball into a home run but didn't.
I've heard reports that game framerates aren't being impacted when the resolution is changed.
This is not just about optimising games for ARM, but mostly on Adreno GPU as well.. So qualcomm needs 2x effort over what intel did on optimising ARC gpus for 2 years
Or they just get NVIDIA GPUs working
With a little TLC I think this could have potential. I mean these laptops aren't even meant for this purpose.
Cant use for productivity because of ARM. Can't use for gaming because of ARM. Is the $1400 laptop a youtube video simulator
CS2 hasn't been out for "years" yet.
man, that GTA V stuttering 😂😂. how is that okay?
People defending this saying its emulation or driver, what do you think if you want to play games or anything that x86 already does better ,will you just be like " Oh its the emulation, I guess i wont do this then "
look. there's a lot that ARM *can* do better than x86. if you want a good example look at apple products with their ARM silicon.
also software evolves constantly. but there's some catching up to do as with this new hardware architecture a lot of software needs to be rewritten and rebuilt so it works on these CPUs. the emulation layer is just there for a smoother transitioning and legacy applications that don't need top end performance.
Already tested by some medias, this SOC is not even able to beat M1. AND price is DOUBLEed.
it literally isn't though. it's slightly faster than M1, based on geekbench 6 benchmarks, which btw is already incredibly high performance. we don't need more on the CPU side really. and that with incredible efficiency.
I'm SHOCKED that microsoft would release a half baked ARM ecosystem!
maybe the GPU instructions are so ARM64, some videos shows that the Intel Ultra fails this Snapdragon at video rendering in Davinci Resolve
O no its almost like they said that 1000x during marketting .
*Joey* would thought it's a amazing pc 😂
it's a new adreno gpu developers were devloping games for direct x this gpu is new so give it some time
Qualcomm specifically said these are not made for gaming not sure why people are expecting them to do it well...
Idk bcs of the price? And power effeciency is notthat great when you hit it with load? Are you buying promises or real product? Ask ypurself
And as you said. Are you buying promises or real product. Qualcomm themselves clearly stated that the device is NOT a gaming product... I don't know what "not that great" battery efficiency is when it's going like for like and in some tests that I have seen outlast the macbook m3's in some battery life tests.
I'd never recommend buying a 1st gen product and probably never will.
As for because of the price, will you buy a MayBach and expect it to go number one on the track because of the price?
Microsoft is to blame for at least half the disappointment here. The failed to include interesting Ai features by the release of these Elite chips, they failed to include competent emulation, they failed to polish Qualcomm's drivers for Windows 11 and the state of Windows 11 as a whole is a complete mess with its "updates" breaking most older systems so for newer hardware is even worst
Video starts at 5:40
Just a Microsoft surface laptop with a new coat of paint
Uhh... 50-55 degrees on the keyboard is not IEC Standard 60950-1 compliant. That's a hazard.
All those games were emulating x86 on arm.
Question, the games that you were able to run were they actually optimized for that particular chipset? If not, that answers your question on why those games ran like crap.
Is the performance bad due to no-little driver support?
Yes, but also due to the fact that the Adreno GPU feature set is a decade or so behind Nvidia and AMD GPUs.
But stutters and low 1% values with okish averages suggest CPU issue rather than GPU. Maybe some translation layer issues are happening
just graphics driver problems together with x86 emulation. noone really expected that to be smooth from the get go. things will get better just give it time.
If those issues were on AMD or nvidia GPUs then reviews will be terrible. Counter strike 2 performance was pretty bad even from iGPU from decades ago
So it is not a gaming chip good to know. I hope they are not marketing it as such.
Right now I think it is going through the pain of the CPU architecture shift process. For me i really do not care which one wins. x86, ARM, or RISC-V for windows does run on all 3 of them it runs best on ARM but programs for windows run best on x86. For RISC-V well it can run and for programs it is still at the stage of you compile it yourself for most programs.
I think Qualcomm was smart being the first ARM chip in a windows computer even though the GPU is still a mobile GPU with mobile GPU performance.
What i am wondering is if AMD, Intel and/or nVidia will allow laptop makers to use their GPU in a laptop design with a ARM chip.
Qualcomm literally said its chips were not designed for gaming and yet certain youtubers just can't get over themselves as if everyone plays games. Nonsense.
Blame the regular ppl too for wanting this . These idiots don't realize it's essentially just competitor to macbook which is also not for gaming (only for efficiency to performance)
Exactly. These are not really gaming laptops. The purpose of these laptops is to create alternative apple experience in battery performance and hopefully it will get better with video editing and content creation with software support getting better.
how is it in cloud gaming?
what was the nic?
it's just like my Intel HD4000 Graphics perfromace.
Maybe few Ups and downs depending on the games
When you want your game performance on your high end laptop to be dog shit slow. That's assuming the game even runs at all.
So its just like every macbook. Got it
Drivers. Need. Updates. Speaking of which, driver updates are in beta
You should try mobile games ?
Windows Arm still sucks then...
The future better with new AMD AI 370 ❤
so this is the new, "brand new" X-elite that they said run the same as m3 silicon performance..the best chip ever ...i am for sure gonna buy it...then run half life and just watch it stutter n i hope it will upgrade to seizure as well yeayyy
look. the stutters are a driver issue so it's expected they will be fixed. besides that though, gpu isn't quite at the level it should be so there's hoping they will sort that out. but what you get is already incredible CPU performance, as in, on par with high end desktop CPUs, which translates to a great multitasking experience, and just using them for regular usage. plus you get absolutely incredible battery life. i'm talking BETTER battery life then what you get from your phone. clearly there's a lot of potential here and this is absolutely going to be the future of computing.
@@EJM07 bro i domt know i could only partially agree to what u typed....apart from improving battery life still does'nt show any significant or mildly changes...
@@padukajebat8084 true, they’ve made an awful entry with this. It’s unfortunate but these first generation of laptops should probably be treated more like a dev kit than a real product for now.
@@EJM07 yeahhh i agree with this..should be for developer kit...
Snapdragon X-Elite still emulates x86/x64 code FASTER than Intel chips running natively - and that's pretty sad for Intel.
Prolly the whole architecture needs some time to mature, just like intel ARC. After all, all games are made with x86 instructions in mind and not ARM64. Give it time. I'm sure they'll manage.
they will. they managed to do it too on apple silicon just fine. arm is the future.
to fix game and graphics just combine x elite with dedicated gpu but they probably too lazy to do it
I want to see how good the X Elite does in Linux since I dont use Windows
Can ppl stop saying that CS runs on a potato? even CSGO was relatively "hard" to run before turning into CS2, which is a way more demanding game now, sure you don't need the absolute best hardware for an enjoyable experience but def shouldn't be compared with CSGO
Try installing Linux to see if its Windows that is the limiting factor here.
its almost certainly, windows on arm is awful even with the improvements that have been made
@@theaveragecactus does any linux distro even have a translation layer like Prism to run x86 apps?
@@davidpodeszwa7010 there is box64 and allegedly proton works on arm as well
@@davidpodeszwa7010yes there are box86/64 dose that. But seeing as there is no official support till 6.11 and a lot of these laptops are locked down getting Linux on the might be hard.
These chips aren't gaming focused but may get better with future optimizations and updates, that doesn't sound all that bad
For the price, It better do more than just benchmarks.
LOL I knew it. ARM is *not* the future. This is gonna take many months if not years of improvements and by the time they get there, the energy efficiency of x86 would match if not exceed these ARM devices. We already have the Steam Deck being able to underclock to use just 5 watts and still play a lot of games. Why do we need ARM for the so-called "efficiency"? Protip: we dont
It's not just ARM.. It's adreno gpu as well.. Even Intel needed 2 years optimizing ARC.
So ARM + Adreno is double the work
@@crysed7897They been at it for years. Qualcomm has been working on this since Windows RT days. The main issue of Adreno on windows is that everything is on a wrapper to dx12, even the dx 11 support is through a wrapper.
@@crysed7897 then we shall wait 2x the time
Well its not the future because this is Microsoft we are talking. But we have examples of efficiency in ARM, you are using it on your phone at this very moment. And Apple also did show it can be done too Heck even Raytracing is becoming possible with these chips for a while now.. The problem has always been Microsoft and a bit of Qualcomm screwing it up. Microsoft don't have the team to pull it of for their software suit it seems.
I can imagine what an M4 max 16in laptop will run light in low power mode.
I bet it’ll run natively run games pretty well.
I can imagine it’ll be AMD’s new strix GPU laptops that’ll be trading blows with the M4 max the latter half of the year.
I don't think I could trust Samsung to make a decent Notebook. My money is on Lenovo.
Buying this snapdrag elite. Is just a --- "the price of compensation".
Well.. i will buy that lap'top in price [uhmm🤔🤔], $599 or $699 😀
So it's Chip is not bad it's just a software support is abysmal. So either Microsoft fixes it or we forever go back to Intel and AMD.
if this is the future of windows then im ready for linux, ai is waste of time and money for most consumers and copilot is blatant spyware
I wonder how Linux would run on this , and of course gaming on it
it wouldn't. qualcom hasn't put the drivers in the linux kernel yet, I don't think they are expected until 6.10/6.11
You get paid to make advertising, we don't, nobody would pay for double pricy products that worse than old M1.
Stop calling it playable when you need to run a game at 720p lol. Not even my kids would accept 720p. Also the lack of proper AVX support is an obvious game breaker for a huge portion of x86 games. Only native ARM games have any hope
the real question is can it run tetris
book 4 edging
Exactly what I expect from windows ARM on ARM processor
A failure 😂😂😂😂
arm really is the future though. the cpu side of this whole x elite soc is *on par* with high end enthusiast level *desktop cpus* at the fraction of the power consumption. just let that sink in. they just need to get the gpus on the same level and we will have high end desktop performance in mobile devices....
What an overpriced piece of junk.
I'm surprised you wasted your time testing these. I wouldn't expect any decent game to run on arm emulation. These PCs will be okay for surfing the web or Excel/word spreadsheets. Great battery life. And as people make arm programs they will work fine. But running a resource intensive game on these is in no no.
Who wants to pay 1400$ for an over priced chromebook? That's exactly what this is.