Qualcomm's new PC chip delivers gaming performance on par with AMD's best integrated graphics

pcgamer.com:

Last week, Qualcomm announced its plans to meet AMD and Intel head-on in the PC market, with the launch of its impressive looking Snapdragon X Elite processor. Little was said about the integrated GPU, though, so how well it would fare in gaming was a bit of a mystery. Not anymore, as Qualcomm recently let a host of journalists test some games and the results are promising.

In the closed-door event, two laptops sporting the Elite X chip were offered for some limited investigations. One had a 15.6-inch 4K screen and an 80W power limit on the new chip, whereas the other housed a 14.5-inch 2800 x 1800 display and a CPU power limit of just 23W. Our sister site Anandtech was one of the attendees, as was tech YouTuber Geekerwan, and between them, we've gleaned a decent insight into what the new chip's gaming chops are like.

There still isn't much known about the GPU, unfortunately. Qualcomm offered a figure of "up to 4.6 TFLOPS" to indicate its shading ability but without any context for that number it doesn't really tell you much. If it's for FP32 data values and doesn't involve any dual-issue sleight-of-hand, then that would put it roughly on par with a GeForce GTX 1650 Super.

All the processing power in the world is useless if it's not backed up by a decent cache system and plenty of global memory bandwidth. We have no idea about the former yet, but in the case of the latter, both test laptops used LPDDR5X-8533. That's pretty much the fastest low-power RAM you can get for chips like the Elite X, so the GPU was well supported from that area.

Geekerwan compared the 80W X Elite's result in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark to one for a Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU, which sports a Radeon 780M GPU. Unlike many of the 3DMark tests,