Snapdragon X Elite Gaming Isn't Great: A Rocky Start For Windows on ARM
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- Опубліковано 7 вер 2024
- Note: Dark Souls 3 and Control are indeed running with Auto SR upscaling, hence the 768p resolution limit (it 'upscales' to 1080p here). Auto SR has no significant impact on performance vs native 768p.
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Probably cost microsoft an arm and a leg
An ARM and a leg
@APEXGuerilla the way the performance and compatibility is I think they have not earned capital letters yet lol
Just bag of fish and CHIPS.
LMAO🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@APEXGuerilla Woosh!
Thank you for not hyping a new competitor just because it's new. Most media outlets are massively overselling the potential of ARM with clickbait headlines.
At the same time we know its capable, there just something about Microsoft unable to make it work on their Windows on Arm platform. And they been trying to for 10+ years, so at this point it seems like incompetence in their part, and I am sure Qualcomm is not happy about it.
We’ve seen it work on other platforms. Why are these games running worse on Windows than many of them do with a less performant chip on MacOS under any number of emulation and virtualization layers?
@@cartilagehead6326 It seems Microsoft really really lack the developers talents or time to get them done right.
@@cartilagehead6326 Apple designs their machines from top to bottom and that includes the software. I always hear about how talented Apple CPU engineers are, and I assume that they hire programmers that are just as skilled. Architecture alone is probably not going to make your processor superior to another if your engineers are inferior. Disclaimer: I'm just a semi power user and don't work in computer engineering or science, I may not be entirely correct.
Like someone else here said "the battery life is not much better than amd 8840u and zen5 will probably have better battery life and much better performance." The rhetoric that x86 is finished and we should embrace our ARM overlords with their performance losing and bug inducing emulation, spyware ridden software, operating systems designed with planned obsolescence, and locked bootloaders is what keeps us from getting a x86 gaming smartphone that would presumably be as repairable as handheld PCs. If not, I'm sure they'd at least let us replace the battery and OS.
Alex's future pet hate. "Exe recompilation stutter".
JIT Translation Stutter lol
now my RTX 3050 laptop seems not that bad LOL
I'm not that surprised that microsoft is not very good at DirectX anymore, given you can emulate directX12 faster than running it natively with dxvk
What's your source for this? DXVK is for DirectX 9 - 11, VKD3D is the translation layer for DirectX 12.
@@adds-kz3oc i think he wanted to say vkd3d and yeah in some games like alan wake 2, vkd3d does perform better
I think it's more to do with the graphics drivers, which are done by the GPU manufacturer and not MS.
saw this coming. with so few actual benchmarks in the marketing materials and "reviews", something felt off. We shall see how (if) the situation improves
It won't. The pricing isn't great. 1000-1200k is a non starter for a laptop/pc in the business/consumer world. If I run a business do you think I will pay 1200 to become a guinea pig? I can buy almost 2 laptops that will provide 90 percent what these laptops do. You also get 100 percent compatibility with x86.
Isn’t the surface only being sold for business right now?
Nah
I mean when they tols us it was leagues better than the M3 chip, I was like "let's see it running on Windows first"
Well some will say that windows sometimes don't work on x86 at times too as a joke, but that's telling something.
Makes me curious how Linux will do once support for the SoC lands later the year (probably).
Qualcomm should have worked with developers to make games work well and truly showcase the Snapdragon X’s true potential using native Windows ARM applications and optimizing the game. But atleast I think they confirmed Baldurs gate 3 is going to get a native windows arm version in the future.
The problem with that is very, very few games will be recompiled to be native ARM compatible. They need to demonstrate these games running on the translation layer with a proper GPU. If we can pair these CPUs with something like an Nvidia GPU that would be what I'd be interested in seeing.
You are seeing its true potential.
It's the same thing with Apple Silicon. The GPU is just weaksauce compared to any dGPU laptop at the same price.
ARM GPU's just kinda suck as of right now for basically any demanding GPU workloads.
Clamchowder tested adreno gpus against nvidia/amd/intel and found they are just too slow at some workloads.
Re. the Snapdragon X’s true potential
Here's what Sebastian Aaltonen (developer of the HypeHype renderer and former principal at Unity and Ubisoft) observed:
"
Snapdragon CPU core is around *2x faster than PS5 CPU core*. Emulation takes 20% in CPU heavy code. Thus Snapdragon CPU core is still 160% performance of PS5 CPU core. Let's assume the game only uses 8 cores, so 4 Snapdragon cores can idle.
The problem is that the same game runs at 60 fps on PS5 and less than 30 fps in Snapdragon, even though Snapdragon cores have 160% performance when they emulate x64. Why it runs 2x slower? It's because the GPU is so slow.
Now if we reduce rendering resolution, this doesn't have any difference in CPU workload, but the game runs MUCH faster. This is a clear tell that we are *heavily GPU bound*. And GPU is not emulated, as I said before.
*Qualcomm put a phone GPU to their laptop*. It's the same thing but clocked higher. *This is not fast enough to run PC games*. CPU is not the bottleneck, so emulation doesn't matter. Except for loading times.
"
(X, SebAaltonen, status/1805343050350116935)
I'm not a Steve Jobs fan, and can't afford Apple products yet, but I agree with his quote: "Microsoft has no taste."
In couple years they will improve the compatibility, a lot of native ARM software will come out. Then NVIDIA will release an ARM SOC for Windows with RTX iGPU, it's going to be amazing!
Microsoft needs to step up their game in terms of their Windows on ARM department. They need to hire more developers, so they can better optimize the operating system, DirectX API, Vulkan, etc. on ARM based devices.
This laptop hopefully will improve in the coming months.
Microsoft isn’t even selling the new arm surface to consumers yet.
saw this coming, not surprised. people be overhyping ARM for years
Or Microsoft straight up being incompetent hampering its true potential... As usual. I wonder how these chips perform on MacOS or Linux.
@@Deliveredmean42 we can agree microsoft is incompetent, but being a linux user myself, arm development is really slow here too.
the battery life is not much better than amd 8840u and zen5 will probably have better battery life and much better performance
The God of war frame time spikes are hilarious.
I was expecting most titles to run like God of War on the new Arm chips but I wasn't expecting so many titles to simply not run and not even give a message as to why. This isn't their first time trying arm, I think they're doing better but it's pretty crazy that they weren't forcing arm dev kits onto other companies so they could tweak compability.
They should had worked in at least one game that took advantage of all the resources available , GPU / CPU and the rest like the way it is now
First impression are hard to shake up, so yeah...
People keep talking about Microsoft, but these games are likely GPU limited, which has nothing to do with Microsoft's Prism CPU emulation. Qualcomm has to address the problems with the GPU driver, not Microsoft. Adreno is a Qualcomm CPU.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way, you consciously chose to touch the cutting edge of technology and got cut. The fact that non-x86 laptops were greenlit, manufactured and sold is a big win for the future of computing. the move to Arm is conceptually not focused on Gaming, that'll happen eventually but not gen 1
Guess I'll start saving for a Strix laptop, what a death knell this is.
You sure you wanna deal with ASUs warranty ?
@@damiantalaga4404 I didn't mention Asus?? I'm talking about AMD Strix Point/Halo not Asus Strix laptops
I dont like the cost of these new laptops with the chipset. But high costs always accompany new tech so not suprising. Its pretty neat to see a revitalization of arm based laptops though. Apart from apples custom stuff. Hopefully it keeps being supported and native arm apps start to make headway.
It won't. I don't know anybody who is jumping on these laptops.
Pro tip, Digital Foundry: When an application fails to start, you can usually run it from the command line to see what error output it produces. It may still not be enough for you to remedy the situation, but you could at least present relevant discoveries to viewers.
I love that this footage is what originally people were claiming the Switch 3rd Party games would be like. 😅
I'd really like to see NVIDIA SoC with beefy GPU. That should fix all possible GPU related incompatibilities. I wouldn't be surprised if most issues are from poor GPU drivers or just fundamental GPU hardware design choices that do not play well with actual PC games. MS still needs to add AVX/AVX2 emulation support for Prims.
17:05 It depends on how far back you want to go with palm pilots, netbooks and Palm tops - but I believe the _"Pocket PC's"_ John is most likely referring too, were running on ATOM (Centrino) processors.
2000 pounds 😂😂😂😂😂😂
it doesnt have dedicated gpu and its igpu is totally new in this space, so its expected performance
It’s basically a phone GPU
@@itsprod.472 , which is a massive potential
How is an iGPU "totally new"? iGPUs themselves already exist in laptops and other ARM devices as well. The only new thing here are drivers for Windows I guess.
@@Gramini its an IGPU made for mobile
later they decided to optimise for laptop
and call it a day! lol
give them sometime, they will optimise it
also
processor seems beast
pair it with some decent gpu like 4060 (efficient)
u got great mobile productivity and gaming device
Well from the bginning it was marketed as aproductivity first, light gaming on the side, so I wasnt expecting much regarding gaming, what puts me off still is the snapdragon isnt as effecient as we are made to believe, compared to Apple Silicon which is what they were aiming with this gen of surface devices (to hit macbook air 13 style and performance)
The purpose of this laptop os more of a "light user" just make sure when you buy it that the apps you need do run well on ARM (via natively or through Prism) I assume compatibility will increase with time, I decided not to buy one since I already have an ultrabook that gets the job done for when im on the move.
But sincerely, I hope this succeeds because then we might start seeing a better snapdragon ARM CPU on future devices that become better with time, on a comparative note, lets remember back to 2020 how the apple silicon started (even though apple seemed to be better focused and nailed it a bit better than microft just did)
Tech companies are great at blowing smoke up customers asses prior to release. Then they push out the fact gen 2 will address the issues, then the cycle resumes.
Can you run Android on it? Would be interesting to run a native ARM game such as Genshin Impact compared to the same game running on Windows.
I feel like I am out of the loop here, who exactly are the people expecting to game on Windows ARM? Windows itself barley runs on ARM so why expect it to do gaming?! At least anywhere before 2030..
They have been so quiet until launch for x86 emulation terrible perfs, but 90% of tech reviewers are giving super positives reviews of those arm scams
Can you guys please talk about the Riven Remaster?
Yes! It looks gorgeous and I want to see them cover it
Wish this video was in 4K :(
I mean the Rosetta 2 translation was pretty poor at the launch. I'm not impressed by X Elite but I'll keep my eyes on the next generation.
Really? Rosetta 2 was pretty painless for not a huge performance loss from what I experienced. I barely felt any problems
@@nitinankupeople are being a little bit revisionists. Emulation on Rosetta was a lot better than this.
I wonder how Linux will run on this. There's an Ubuntu desktop 22.04.4 LTS ARM build. I don't know if the steam installer is available in it's repo. [edit] Seems that the steam installer for 22.04 is only for i386.
Isn't the architecture problem still there though? The game would need to run emulated in a Windows arm emulator for Linux. An ARM version of Proton wouldn't be able to translate the calls. Would it?
Kinda. But most of that stuff is open source, so with a little luck it only needs compiling for a different architecture.
9:28 oh
...Oooh.
I wish someone would explain out loud why Microsoft didnt have its studios compile ARM builds/executables for its games. All these games people tested are running emulated. These are not realistic results because games need to run natively.
@@jc_dogen does it beat the tiny steam deck gpu?
@@jc_dogen which rendering technics?
I would like to see how that arm cpu is with a discrete gpu. It's hard to tell in any tests because it's held back by the crappy adreno gpu. But maybe it cant communicate with discrete gpus how it is now?
Is the issue the GPU or the CPU? If the CPU, that's highly problematic. If the GPU, I don't care. I'd love a gaming laptop with one of these highly efficient, cool CPUs paired with a proper Nvidia GPU to get the best blend of battery life and gaming performance. Until then, I don't care about gaming benchmarks on these.
The CPU is decent and it should be faster than a comparable TDP x86 but the GPU seems to not play well with PC games
This is why I dropped $2000 on a simple desktop PC. It plays all the games and I have an old surface laptop for work and a SteamDeck for portable gaming.
These are meant to fill the "Surface laptop for work" niche
Thanks for the vid, not a Qualcomm fan, I knew the CPU was overhyped, I'll get to that later but I'd like to point something out about translation:
It learns and remembers and builds, the second and third time you run anything should be a little better each time, till the third or fourth time I suppose.
Now I want to get to that X elite POS:
Even if we believed qualcomm's own benchmarks, it did not beat the worst CPU Apple makes this year, and barely beat the lowest in Apple's lineup last year.
It doesn't beat year old zen4 like 7940, only being 10% more efficient, and it doesn't even have better efficiency than this year zen4 8940, 8940 performance much better when set to draw the same as the Qualcomm POS X elite.
I have no idea why nobody saw through qualcomm's overhype because the benchmark numbers were there, and already proved it was garbage
ARM is a lie, it needs exponentially more transistors, packed tighter to give the illusion of performance and efficiency
Apple M best never beat x86 best even with exponentially more transistors, better NM for more instructions and higher efficiency and it still lost at everything but instruction per watt
Once x86 is on the same NM with the same transistor count, IF we set it to the same draw it will beat ARM
As we already see in zen4 and soon even more so with zen5
ARM? More like ARSE!!!
Hehe 🙃
I wait one year to buy one of those at 200$ second hand from one of the millions disapointed customers, then at this price i can call it a good machine for media consuming...
How did you not know its pronunciation when it’s an acronym for “republic of gamers” 😂😂
“You buy a PC and excpect it to work”… like… do you really?
Yeah, just like any other product
Before the arm laptops. Of course. I'm not a prebuilt fan but in the case of buying laptops, yea bought more than one in the past and I'm running games an hour after buying the thing.
I think that DF should test MS first party game first.
If even their own games running bad. They need to present about the gaming again.
Do we have any hardware with a Snapdragon X Elite running with any Nvidia or AMD Graphics Card???
Not possible yet, same problem Apple needs to solve with their ARM chips. They're all SOCs with the GPU integrated.
Arm processors are GREAT processors. Windows on Arm is just... bad.
Typical Microsoft. Everything has to be half-arsed.
But this is only about gaming, right? how are the new laptops for non gaming stuff.
I wonder how it fares on Linux side of things.
And you can have all this glorious stutter for only 2000 GBP!
sad reality. so gonna buy 50xx laptop next 😢
Was there any reality where that was not the case for gaming? Windows itself barley runs on ARM so why expect it to do gaming?!
This is really bad. I'm kinda dissapointed.
Was this what they screwed over their AI collaboration with AMD for?
A glimpse of Rich's Steam account 👀
Guys. These are not gaming laptops.
The problem is that, not just the games have problems to run properly (all DirectX and OpenGL have problems because they are using Vulcan GPU bzt Windows used DirectX and OpenGL mainly.. and when blender and other apps what are not games but work related programs also fail to run, than what is the excuse, it's not working machines..?)
@@TamasKiss-yk4st That is fair. The reason I can't use these laptops is an obscure corporate driver based VPN system that does not work.
My idea would be to Google Playstore games
So DF guys ARM or AMD for PS6?
I wonder if Nvidia could do better. They have an arm CPU architecture now, and their GPU architecture attached to it.
first user of arm nvidia will be switch 2
Someone should test the jetson board with games
Compare it with m3 macbook air
Don't make me tap the sign: the X Elite was never going to be competitive in gaming and Qualcomm barely advertised it as much. The iGPU might be even less advanced than the Adreno found in today's smartphones given the lack of hardware ray tracing and broader DX12 Ultimate support (trivial in small laptops but still an indicator of advancement in other areas).
This is for web browsing, word processing, 2D artwork, streaming series, remote work and quick and dirty programming without having to charge at the end of the day. Slightly worse macbook but it has Windows. Wait for Strix/Kraken Point and Lunar Lake if you want more.
I’ll always say it like an acronym and not an initialism: ROG.
Not every initialism is an acronym, treating them as such makes the speaker sound stupid. I cringe when I hear someone say gooey instead of G.U.I. and rog doesn't sound much better.
X86 > all.
This shows android phones will not be able to run pc games well. Considering even qualcoms implementstion runs too poorly.
Rocky start ... but very promising. It's becoming likely that in the near future people would be able to game on ARM laptops. And without a doubt ARM laptops are superior to x86 in practically every other way. Also enticing is thinking of ARM on desktop: the much improved efficiency over x86 means we would be able to clock the cores very, very high with much less of a heat dissipation challenge.
I dont share your narrative on this video. Snapdragon X Elite does have a GPU, but its also far from a powerhouse for gaming, let alone it running on a translation layer for the CPU on all games. Then comparing it to apples arm? Yeah, they didnt even have games to begin with and just now starting to emulate games on a small scale. ARM as the CPU, then a dedicated GPU will be the interesting thing here, as with all "gaming" laptops.
Eh, these issues will be resolved with time. It’s a new architecture, kinda unfair to compare it to Mac’s transition and say it’s worse when as far as I can tell almost all productivity programs are compatible. Half the games tested don’t even have a Mac version, I’d say it’s a success so far.
Its not new. Back in 2018 qualcomm put their chip in windows laptop.
Windows on ARM is nothing new. The issue here is that this is the very first time Microsoft has put such chip in their own premium hardware product. One would assume that a company which is making Windows and DirectX will be able to do a much better job and work with chip supplier to ensure decent drivers are available day one. This is simply inexcusable.
Does no one understand what these machines actually are? They're not gaming laptops, and no one should be expecting much for games on these. The benefit is the increased battery life and better thermals for productivity tasks on laptops. It's not replacing dedicated GPUs. Asking "what else is the purpose" is a bit ridiculous- Windows is the most widely-used OS for business tasks and laptops are now extremely common at work.
*shit OS and shit AI on arm
PC will always be the better platform to play video games.
Cause PC is only used for Piracy and cheat mods.
Driver updates, shader compilation stutters, hackers, Epic Game Store, terrible HDR support, no physical games, Windows 😂😂😂
Emulation is a reason to buy a PC!
@@No.1komanga , thers no emulation in pc, only PIRACY
And also this is not a gaming laptop
If the chipsaid sony they will hype it with exactly the same results
Why dont you test a real game like nazi zombies portable arm release
This is literally the first time I am downvoting a Digital Foundry video. Very disappointed at the lack of technical knowledge and preparation on what to expect from these chips and computers.
None of the new Copilot+ machines are supposed to be gaming machines. Qualcomm did say you could run some games on them, and there was an article explaining the super scaling tech... but DF took those and seems to think they were trying to make NVidia DLSS gaming competitors. These are BUSINESS machines designed for productivity software... most of them are in the ultra-portable category. They aren't meant for serious gaming... they just wanted to note that you should be able to play some games on them, and that is in stark contrast to previous versions of Windows on ARM which were much less compatible. MS isn't Apple... they can't decree that anyone not supporting ARM will get booted from the platform, so they have a much more difficult path to getting ARM compatibility, which has been an ongoing project for many years.
John's comment "what else is the purpose of this laptop then?" is simply ridiculous garbage. The purpose is a Windows machine that runs faster than AMD/Intel (and often even Mac) for productivity apps while getting much better battery life. This coverage is well below Digital Foundry's normally high standards and fairness.
Let's all be honest about something;.....😅
Expecting anything other than half-baked, copied versions of other products is all we should ever expect from Microcrap. Everything they have released since the 2010s has been far inferior to their competitors. (Google, Apple, Sony)
If we were honest like we were with recall on all MS products, no one would waste hard earned money on anything from that company. 😢
These are productivity machines, not gaming ones
They shouldn’t have marketed its gaming performance then.
That's what I was thinking. I never saw the Surface as a gaming machine. Mostly for business or school work.
@@ArchieBunker11 they said “it’s not a gaming laptop, but it can game” then showed baldurs gate running at 1080p low at 30. Nobody would’ve assumed this was designed as a gaming laptop with that performance
@@ArchieBunker11
They marketing wasn’t for a gaming device
It was a productivity device that could play new AAA games at low settings
@@christianr.5868 If you were made aware of it prior to release, thats them, marketing it.
Microsoft wants to battle with Apple and want a win, Apple laughs at Microsoft instead 😂🤣.
Perfect for android phones and tablets but a windows pc hell no😂😂😂
Kind of a disappointing video here. Imagine buying a thin-and-light notebook with an integrated gpu that never really marketed itself as capable of playing games and complaining that it was bad for gaming. Especially as an ostensibly journalism adjacent outfit. I'd genuinely be interested to know the actual performance of these devices and what could be fixed in updates, but this is just a weird whiny hitpiece. Normally DF is great, this is pretty bad form for this channel.
It costs 2000 pounds, cry more 👶🍼
@@santiniperico8627 So do tons of thin and light that literally cant play games. Fun fact, you can do other things with laptops other than play league of legends. Like work. Why tf is DF even reviewing this? Whens the last time they cried that a 2000 dollar galaxy book couldnt play crisis?
Microcock taking more Ls!!!!!! MEGA L FOR THE GAYBOX FANQUEERS!!!!!!!!!