Last week, Snapdragon claimed that Windows games "just work" on its latest ARM chip, the Snapdragon X Elite. At the time, we said we'd believe it when we saw it. And now we're seeing it. Anyway, here's a glimpse: Devin Arthur of X filmed Baldur's Gate 3 running at about 30 fps on an X Elite laptop.

The video is not very long (via NotebookCheck) and only covers the starting area of Baldur's Gate 3. The fps counter in the upper left corner of the screen clearly shows that it is hovering at least just under 30 fps.

It is necessary to understand what is really going on behind the scenes to understand why this kind of performance can be a pretty big problem for a game system. The game is being developed exclusively for x86 systems, that is, systems built on x86 chips, either Intel or AMD chips, and this laptop, powered by a Snapdragon X Elite, is running Qualcomm's own custom configuration of the ARM instruction set. Running software from one instruction set on hardware from another instruction set requires a conversion layer.

If you are a Steam Deck user, you may be familiar with the translation layer; Valve employs one called Proton, which turns most Windows-based games into games that run (mostly) fine in a Linux environment, with no performance impact. They are turning them into games that don't affect performance. Qualcomm is doing something similar with X Elite, but in another advanced way. In this example, Windows and SteamOS are running on the same type of silicon, while Qualcomm has switched its entire software instruction set from x86 to ARM.

Other companies are doing this same thing. Apple now uses ARM chips of its own design in almost all of its products, but previously used x86 in its Mac products. Migrating all software from x86 to ARM has been a daunting task, and there are still many things that are not built natively on ARM and must be converted to ARM instead.

But Apple has a weakness: games. Today, almost all games, whether for PCs or consoles, are built for x86 systems. Apple has tried to work around this with its Game Compatibility Toolkit, a tool for running games on ARM, but it has yet to be used to bring large game libraries to Apple devices. However, an equivalent tool from Qualcomm is shown below.

Qualcomm gave a talk at GDC claiming that Windows on Snapdragon is "PC game ready". This is a big claim and seems to extend to new games like Baldur's Gate 3.

Currently, Baldur's Gate 3 is not the most demanding game, and the lowest presets of the game run on all kinds of low-end hardware, so it is not known exactly where Qualcomm's low-power ARM chips stand in terms of gaming performance . From what we have seen, and from what we know about the Snapdragon X Elite (a chip that competes with Intel's Meteor Lake chips), it is unlikely to compete with most modern discrete graphics chips.

We still don't know exactly how Qualcomm's chips will impact the real world. If you really want gaming performance in a thin and light laptop, you can certainly find it with an Intel or AMD chip; you don't have to look to ARM for the answer. But if Qualcomm manages to minimize the performance hit of moving gaming from x86 to ARM to almost no performance hit at all, it could eventually completely change what constitutes a gaming PC.