Two weeks ago, at a hotel in downtown Taipei, I was lunging at some of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite laptops, and I was wondering how well they ran Baldur's Gate3 and Metro Exodus, both compiled for the x86CPU architecture, but with a co-created Microsoft/Qualcomm Prism emulation. And I was happy. A few days later, I checked out WoA microsite's piece to see about game compatibility and this is what I saw:

But today, an early review was sponsored and it has nothing to do with the brutal match of Computex showvid-19 that I came back with. 

Dave2D's video provides some fine benchmark numbers at a low preset level of 1080P for the game of your choice, but "The game also has occasional stuttering." I don't think it's stuttering from the hardware stuff, I'm sure it's entirely a software issue. Because the thermal was fine — and sometimes you would go for a long stretch with a sustained frame rate — but eventually you get a stutter."

Even the sponsored Matthew Moniz video about the X Elite-powered Asus Vivobook S15 paid for by Asus states that the game is a real weakness of the Qualcomm chip. Fortnite refuses to load (I think this is an EAC issue from talking to Qualcomm people around Computex) and diablo4 works fine about 1 minute or so before suffering a devastating Prism crash.

Overwatch works, but it appears to be locked to 1280x1080 and "feels like it's translating on the fly." "Because you stutter regularly.Moniz says this is the real problem with ARM-based chips. "No matter what game you play now, if it's optimized for x86, it's a performance hit...If you're playing an Arm game like World of Warcraft, that's a good thing."

" But if you are planning to do any sort of game, you are not going to have the best experience right now."

Well, none of this is really surprising. When it was first announced, Qualcomm was making PC chips and would release laptop silicon to run Windows with an emulation layer for x86 applications, our single one is not something like "Yeah, it's going to be great for PC gaming". It was not.

Still, Qualcomm, oddly enough, has become part of all recent events based on a range of new processors. If you know that as a result of the emulation layer, you will leave a large amount of relative game performance on the table, then you did not need it. Maybe I was surprised that so many games went well and wanted to shout about it, but if the performance was half that of an equivalent x86 machine, it's hard to get too excited right now.

I said I wanted something more exciting, especially when it comes to battery life, especially given how efficient the X Elite architecture should be, the Vivobook S15 has a smaller battery than Intel and offers longer uptime under load, but that's not exactly revolutionary. If I was going to suffer a performance hit, I would at least want something in return.

However, what Dave2D says is that the sleep performance of the X Elite processor is very impressive and it says absolutely not in a laptop running Windows in an x86 environment Close the lid on your laptop and you can be pretty confident after a day of sleep it's drying the battery. You can do it. But the X Elite reportedly only loses something like 1-2% of its battery life overnight. What should be noted is that this is the early door to Qualcomm's new ARM-based PC chip adventure. The report says the hardware is very good, but it's all about software and software emulation layer. And those are things that are likely to improve over time.

So far there has been nothing more than hands-on experience with several different Snapdragon X Elite machines, but they are still notable for their absence from our lab. But we hope that soon our own reviews will be alive.