Qualcomm is currently cooking up its own range of so-called “Elite” chipsets to rival Intel and Apple. However, while we know these chips exist, we haven’t seen much about them apart from a few leaked specs here and there. The company reportedly showcased the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite hardware running on a few notebooks at GDC last week.
During the demo, spectators reported that Qualcomm showed off Control and Baldur’s Gate 3 running on specific notebooks built with Snapdragon X Elite SoCs. Both games were targeting “medium” settings at 30FPS at 1080p. There was also a bit of AMD FSR 1.0 Spatial Upscaling taking place.
Other so-called “Snapdragon Insiders” (which are people paid to promote the hardware), claim to have also seen Elden Ring on these devices too. One user says Elden Ring ran at about 30 frames per second and Baldur’s Gate was between 21-24 fps.
Sure, 21-24 fps isn’t impressive on the grand scale of things but we need to keep in mind that the chip was running these games on Windows on ARM. This isn’t an easy task and according to sources, the demos were also early builds of games developed for the hardware. So performance tweaks are bound to happen at some point.
The report also says that these notebooks only use around 24W of power when running these games at 30FPS target at 1080p. This aligns these devices with other Windows handheld gaming devices. If anything, you may get more battery life from them.
Of course, these chips don’t aim to beat NVIDIA when it comes to gaming performance. They aim to provide gaming alongside other tasks while also offering users a different option outside of the Intel wheelhouse. With some tweaks, perhaps these new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips have a future in the industry somewhere.
