Windows on Snapdragon, and the Silent Revolution That Might Be Coming to the Gaming Market
Mauricio Alegretti
Game Industry Executive | Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at Ortiz Gaming | Founder and Investor at Industria de Jogos | Advisor at Guidepoint | Former Microsoft Xbox MVP | Game Development | Business Development
( vers?o em português deste artigo disponível aqui )
Greetings, fellow game developers and gaming enthusiasts!
Quite discreetly, Qualcomm held a session at this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024 titled "Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games", where they showcased their suite of tools for converting games running on Windows to their Snapdragon chip line, based on ARM architecture. Reports indicate that the audience size was quite small, and the description on the official GDC website isn't exactly captivating. However, amidst this quiet, there may be a storm brewing that could bring drastic changes to personal computing.
With much more fanfare, Microsoft publicly announced on May 20 what they called "PC Reborn," launching the Copilot+ AI PCs. The announcement is impressive not only for the processing power of the new devices, featuring powerful NPUs enabling on-device AI capabilities, but also for the number of manufacturers already supporting the initiative - big names like Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Microsoft itself with its Surface line. The main point, however, is that these new PCs use Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chip, promising long battery life and top-notch energy and thermal efficiency.
So, what does all this have to do with games?
The question is valid, and the association might be overlooked behind all the AI hype in the marketing message, which permeates everything tech-related these days. But yes, the implications are huge, and all the involved companies are well aware of this.
Consider this: ARM architecture currently dominates the majority of devices we use today, from smartphones and tablets to lines of personal computers like Chromebooks, and most notably, the MacBooks with Apple Silicon (M1 and beyond). However, Windows-running computers have always been the "final frontier" for the mass adoption of ARM, being deeply rooted in Intel and x64-based architectures.
These roots are historical and based on two major factors—the vast library of Windows x64 applications in use in businesses and homes, and games.
Microsoft itself has been trying to change this scenario for some years, with initiatives like the Surface RT launch alongside Windows 8, but they always stumbled over users’ dissatisfaction with not being able to run their favorite programs and games.
However, in recent years, both the processing power of ARM chips and emulation technologies have evolved significantly, and Qualcomm itself stated that it expects the majority of games to run on the Snapdragon X in emulation with acceptable performance. To prove their point, they held a closed-door demonstration for influencers in late March in Barcelona and San Diego, showing Baldur's Gate and Control running at 30 FPS.
It might seem like a low bar, and it is for a PC Gamer, but it’s important to consider that the Snapdragon X only has an integrated Adreno GPU. And nothing prevents Qualcomm or other companies like Nvidia or AMD from announcing dedicated ARM chips for gaming on Windows in the future, keeping in mind that the primary focus of the Snapdragon X line is artificial intelligence.
What makes this story even more potentially interesting for game developers is the fact that today, curiously, the two latest generation consoles on the market—PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series—use x64-based architectures, very similar to a Windows PC. This was already a trend for Microsoft (after all, the first Xbox was practically a "PC in a console case running a custom operating system"), which was slightly abandoned during the Xbox 360 era and resumed with the Xbox One, but was also adopted by Sony from the PlayStation 4 onwards. The main reason was to facilitate the porting of popular PC games, especially given Steam's influence, to gaming consoles—a trauma that remained particularly after PlayStation 3 and its powerful but ultra-complex architecture.
And of course, we can’t forget the tremendous success of Nintendo Switch with its Nvidia Tegra X1 processor, proving that a large portion of consumers are willing to trade performance for better battery life, lower heat, and smaller size that an ARM chip provides.
The fact is, if this massive bet by Microsoft and Qualcomm pays off and ARM Windows PCs become popular or even dominant in personal computing, the boundaries between mobile devices, PCs, and console games may become even smaller, making it a matter of simply adapting the experience and user interface for different screen sizes and control methods to target all these devices with a single game.
This, of course, if Cloud Gaming doesn't end up being the ultimate winner and makes the chip in the device irrelevant. Which, in my view, would make it even easier for ARM architecture to triumph.
May the best one win!
Warm regards, and see you next week!
With information from: