Gaming on an ARM-based Snapdragon CPU hasn’t been a smooth journey for Qualcomm, at least based on the first time we reviewed an X Elite laptop. Well, Qualcomm says that the experience will be vastly improved with this week’s launch of its Snapdragon Control panel, among other things.
With the new Control Panel, and the faster X2 Elite chips, Qualcomm says that it has brought some quality-of-life improvements on the software side of things. The Control Panel itself is akin to the NVIDIA App or AMD’s Adrenalin overlay.
Qualcomm also claims that the latest update has stomped out bugs and that it has even improved the performance for more than 100 games since last year. Additionally, it will also provide day zero support and availability of upgradable graphics drivers (UGD) for X2 Elite-powered laptops next year.
The chipmaker is also releasing AVX2 emulation across all Snapdragon X Series laptops, and even provided instructions to enable it. Lastly, it is also rolling out improved compatibility between its ARM-based laptop processors and several anti-cheat software. In this case, Fortnite reportedly runs better.
The chipmaker says that it is also working with other anti-cheat providers, including Tencent’s Anti-Cheat Expert, Roblox’s Hyperion, and Irdeto’s Denuvo, among others.
Gaming on ARM-based machines is slowly and clearly becoming a new norm; the Steam Frame that was recently announced was actually running off an ARM-based Snapdragon laptop, via a translation layer. Granted, it’s a Linux-based system, but again, it’s getting there.
(Source: Qualcomm)
