Last week, Qualcomm announced plans to go head-to-head with AMD and Intel in the PC market, unveiling the impressive-looking Snapdragon X Elite processor. However, little was said about the integrated GPU, so its performance in gaming remained a mystery. Qualcomm recently had a number of journalists test several games, and the results were promising.

At an undisclosed event, two laptops with the Elite X chip were offered for limited investigation: one with a 15.6" 4K screen and power consumption limited to 80W by the new chip, the other with a 14.5" 2800 x 1800 display and the CPU power consumption was limited to only 23W. Our sister site Anandtech was one of the participants, as was tech YouTuber Geekerwan, during which we got a decent insight into what the gaming capabilities of the new chips are like.

Unfortunately, we still don't know much about the GPU. Qualcomm offers a figure of "up to 4.6 TFLOPS" to indicate shading capability, but there is no context for this figure. If this is for FP32 data values and not a dual-issue trick, then it is roughly equivalent to a GeForce GTX 1650 Super. [All the processing power in the world is meaningless if it is not backed by a decent cache system and sufficient global memory bandwidth. We don't know about the former yet, but for the latter, both test laptops use LPDDR5X-8533. This is the fastest low-power RAM available in chips like the Elite X, and the GPUs were well supported from this area.

Geekerwan compared the 80W X Elite's results in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark to those of a Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU with a Radeon 780M GPU. Unlike many 3DMark tests, Wild Life Extreme is designed to run on many platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows on Arm. This benchmark is not an ultralight test, as it runs at 4K internal resolution and then scales everything to the monitor's resolution.

The Elite X's average performance of 44.8 fps is 46% better than the AMD chip's 30.7 fps, which is quite good despite the much lower power limit of the AMD processor Anandtech ran 3DMark Wild Life Extreme on both notebook PCs and found that the 23W version recorded about 39 fps.

To get an idea of what this performance actually means, I averaged 263 fps with the Core i7 9700K and GeForce RTX 4070 Ti combination. While this is certainly nearly seven times faster, the 23W Elite X uses only a fraction of the combined power of the 9700K and 4070 Ti.

After the 3DMark test, Geekerwan quickly played Remedy's third-person shooter "Control. Running at 1080p with low quality settings, the 23W laptop averaged frame rates in the mid-40 fps, sometimes exceeding 50 fps. This is a pretty good result for an integrated GPU, especially considering that the Elite X has to handle x86 emulation to run Control.

Games ported to Windows on Arm will do much better than games that have to go through emulation; even though Control has great ray tracing, limited testing has shown that Qualcomm's new GPUs It is worth noting that it was shown that it does not support.

Or maybe it does, but the feature is not yet supported in the driver, or the x86 emulation has not caught up with the speed at which it handles the DirectX RT API. In any case, the fact that it performed as well as (and sometimes better than) the Radeon 780M is a good indication that this GPU has 12 RDNA 3 compute units. This GPU is the same GPU found in AMD's Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, top-of-the-line Ryzen mobile chips, Asus ROG Ally and Ayaneo Air 1S gaming handhelds, and the latest Framework AMD mainboard integrated graphics.

In other words, Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite could be the perfect chip for the next wave of portable gaming PCs. Much will depend on how much resources Qualcomm invests in driver and emulation development.

But by kicking down the door of PC chips and shouting "It's Johnny" to AMD and Intel, they've certainly set off a bit of an alarm bell in the industry.