Qualcomm touts Intel-beating gaming performance for its Snapdragon X Arm chip, promises gaming app plus monthly GPU driver updates
With the first examples of laptops powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chip landing with actual buying customers, Qualcomm has released some more juicy details around gaming performance and features. According to Qualcomm, its new Arm chip trades blows with Intel's Meteor Lake laptop CPUs, sometimes beating them handily, in a range of games.
The caveat, obviously, is that Qualcomm is hardly an unbiased source. But hold that thought. Qualcomm's latest marketing dump (via Anandtech) commits the company to monthly driver releases for the Snap X's Adreno integrated GPU. Qualcomm also has an Nvidia GeForce Experience-style app for the chip which includes pre-baked optimisations and settings for a range of Windows game titles. So, yeah, Qualcomm is pushing pretty hard with the whole gaming thing.
The new performance numbers show the chip trading blows with Intel's Core Ultra 155H in a suite of nine games running at 1080p. At worst, Qualcomm's benchmarks have the Snapdragon X's Adreno GPU just behind the Intel chip. But in several games, the Qualcomm Arm processor is some distance ahead.
Inevitably, these benchmarks raise as many questions as they answer. No details are given regarding settings other than the 1080p resolution, for example. It's not even clear if this is when running natively or with emulation for the CPU side of the equation, but we assume the latter.
Along with the promise of driver releases for the GPU on a monthly basis with performance upgrades and bug fixes, there's the Adreno Control Panel companion app, which will keep drivers updated and automatically optimise settings on a per-game basis. It's all rather redolent of the sort of setups that Nvidia and AMD have for their gaming GPUs.
Arguably, these are the kinds of features and details that any company hoping to compete in gaming graphics on the PC now needs, but it is perhaps something of a surprise to find Qualcomm pushing so hard on gaming. It's such a big ask to move into gaming with not
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