Qualcomm now ready to treat gaming on its Snapdragon laptops seriously
The company claims massive performance uplift and better game compatibility at launch.
Qualcomm has detailed its new Adreno X2 GPU for the Snapdragon X2 Elite PC platform, claiming up to 2.3× higher gaming performance than the previous Snapdragon X Elite and a clear lead over current integrated GPUs from Intel and AMD. The company also says more than 90% of the most played Windows games will run on the new Arm laptops at launch.
Source: Qualcomm
Adreno X2 is based on Qualcomm’s eighth-generation Adreno architecture and moves to a four-slice design with eight shader processors and 2,048 FP32 ALUs . Local on-chip memory grows to 21 MB, shared L2 cache doubles to 2 MB, and peak memory bandwidth reaches 228 GB/s on the top X2 Elite Extreme SKU. Qualcomm quotes 70% higher performance at the same power as Adreno X1 in 3DMark Time Spy and a 125% gain in performance per watt , with up to 2.3× higher frame rates in tested AAA titles when the chip is allowed to use its full power budget.
In direct comparisons against Intel’s latest integrated graphics, Qualcomm shows the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme outperforming a Core Ultra Series 2 288V system by about 50% in average frame rate at 1080p with medium settings and no upscaling. The chart includes games such as Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Fortnite, and most titles stay above the 30 FPS line on the Snapdragon system.
Source: Qualcomm
Against AMD’s current mobile chips, Qualcomm claims a 29% advantage over a system with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 at similar settings. The comparison uses an internal Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme reference platform, an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V laptop, and an ASUS Vivobook S14 with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
Source: Qualcomm
To support these claims, Qualcomm is expanding its software stack. The Adreno Control Panel app manages driver updates and per-game optimizations, while the GPU exposes native drivers for DirectX 12.2 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.4, OpenCL 3.0, and SYCL.
I think the biggest news is that Qualcomm is finally promising to take driver updates seriously. According to PCWatch, the goal is to go from quarterly to monthly updates , much like AMD, Intel and NVIDIA. The current driver updates for Snapdragon X1 series were uncoordinated and hardly on time for new game releases.
A big part of that compatibility story comes from anti-cheat vendors shipping Arm-native modules that can run in Windows kernel mode. Qualcomm lists support for Epic Games Online Services Easy Anti-Cheat, Tencent ACE Anti Cheat, Roblox, Denuvo by Irdeto, InProtect GameGuard, BattlEye, and Uncheater.
We will see if these are just empty claims or Qualcomm is finally entering a very competitive game, and who knows, maybe we will consider adding Snapdragon Adreno drivers to our site, should these laptops become popular.
Source: PC Watch
