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Windows Central

Technology

Richard Devine

Apparently it's a problem (again) that Snapdragon X Elite laptops that aren't for gaming can't play a lot of games

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There's another report doing the rounds again about the new Snapdragon X series Windows laptop and how they're bad for gaming. You can't see, but I'm doing one of those Captain Picard-esque facepalms.

Breaking news: Snapdragon X Elite laptops are not gaming laptops and never have been. Can they play games? Yes, they can, to varying degrees. But they are not gaming laptops. If you want to drop $1,000 on a gaming laptop, you would buy one with a dedicated NVIDIA, AMD or Intel GPU. Those are the facts. As good as integrated graphics have become, you wouldn't buy a Dell XPS 13 as a serious gaming machine.

The report in question comes from the Wall Street Journal, and rather than being based on much first-hand experience, it seems they're getting the information from third-parties and analysts. This quote seems to sum up the angle.

"Gamers are power users of PCs, accounting for about 15% of laptop users and tens of billions of dollars in business each year, said Henry Chang, an analyst with Taiwan-based research firm Digitimes. "

It's like pretending non-gamers don't exist

THIS is a gaming laptop. (Image credit: Windows Central | Zachary Boddy)

Sure, gamers spend a lot of money and are a valuable market to Microsoft and its laptop OEM partners. But gamers aren't the only people who exist. Snapdragon X laptops, for example, have huge potential in the lucrative enterprise space. Johnny Chairman probably isn't so bothered about thrashing out a couple of rounds of Fortnite when he's done with his latest board meeting.

Yes, gamers are power users and spend tens of billions every year. But they're not the only people buying laptops. I have a gaming laptop, but I rarely take it out of the house because I need it to last more than an hour when it's not connected to a wall outlet. When I want a PC to be mobile, I'm using something better suited, right now an Acer Swift Edge 16.

Snapdragon X laptops are the first of a new generation of slim, light, highly performant portable PCs. We're only just at the beginning, and comparisons to Apple are always going to be drawn. But let's not pretend that it's exactly the same, since Apple is now into its fourth generation of ARM chips. We're still on the first.

Gaming isn't a total bust, whatever anyone says

This is Control running on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop, and it's perfectly playable while looking pretty good. (Image credit: Windows Central)

I'm not here to flat out discredit reports like this, because with first-hand experience, I know there's truth in it. Just the same as when the Steam Deck launched, there were, and still are, compatibility issues with running games built for Windows x86_64 on a platform that isn't that.

Name-dropping League of Legends and Fortnite is fine, but as the report also says, the issue here is the anti-cheat. Guess what? The Steam Deck suffers the same issues with the same software. Without anti-cheat being updated to run on the platform, usually it just won't work. Blame the cheaters for this stuff having to exist at all. Riot Games uses an aggressive kernel-level anti-cheat, so I'm not expecting support for that any time soon.

But referring back to the start of this post, these are not gaming laptops. Sure, they've been shown off with gaming at times, and yes, those were very much cherry-picked experiences. But gaming isn't the focus, yet for a lot of people that aren't interested in these anti-cheat filled multiplayer titles, they'll have a good time.

Microsoft could always have done more, but it isn't standing still. I refer you to this section from a post I've written previously detailing Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR), an ARM-exclusive upscaler built into Windows.

"Copilot+ PCs aren't gaming laptops, but gaming is important to a lot of people. Sure, you won't be cranking out a maxed-out Cyberpunk 2077, but that doesn't mean folks who buy one won't want to play some games. Why should everyone have to consider either a secondary machine or buying a gaming laptop with terrible battery life, just on the chance they'll be able to play some of their favorite titles?

That's where Auto SR can really make a difference, albeit in very limited form right now. But DLSS started off small, too, and look where that is now. It's still very early days, but it's impressive already, and that will only continue to evolve as time passes."

7 Days to Die is another title that runs well on Snapdragon with Auto SR support. I know because I took the image. (Image credit: Windows Central)

The WSJ reports even goes on to acknowledge Qualcomm's own words saying Snapdragon X isn't currently considered a gaming platform, and that it's actively engaging with Epic Games over making its anti-cheat (Easy Anti Cheat or EAC) compatible with ARM.

This stuff takes time. While it would have been extremely pleasing for this to be hammered out before these chips launched, it's still a secondary focus at this time.

Regardless of what any analyst says, I can speak from personal experience that gaming on Snapdragon X laptops isn't bad. Can I play all the games I want to play? No, I can't. But the same is true on my Steam Deck. Unless you buy a Windows gaming laptop with the necessary hardware, there will always be compromise.

In the meantime, should you ditch the idea and run out and get a Mac if you want an ARM-powered gaming laptop? Absolutely not. If gaming is important to you, do what you should have always done to this point. Buy a gaming laptop.

Can we stop with the sensationalist headlines trashing this stuff yet?