The much-awaited Snapdragon X Elite CPU platform has been demoed running Baldur's Gate 3 at 30 FPS as a demonstration of its gaming GPU performance.
Snapdragon X Elite's Adreno GPU Delivers Around 30 FPS In Baldur's Gate 3 at 1080p, Software Work To Enable Faster Gaming Performance
We recently talked about how Qualcomm is working to ensure that PC gamers who will be using its upcoming Snapdragon X Elite CPU-powered laptops will get a great gaming experience. They stated that most games will be able to run on the upcoming Windows PCs. The company is providing devs three options for running games on its Arm-based platforms which include (via The Verge):
- Running Native on ARM64 (Best Performance / Best Efficiency)
- Running Hybrid ARM64EC - Program Emulated, Drivers/Libraries Native (Similar Performance)
- Running x64 Emulation - No Dev Work Required (Slower Performance vs Native)
The main component that will be powering these experiences on the Snapdragon X Elite platform is the Adreno GPU which is rated at up to 4.6 TFLOPs and will feature support for DX12, DX11, Vulkan, OpenCL via the drivers while also retaining legacy support for DX9 and OpenGL 4.6. In official slides presented a while back, Qualcomm showcased a 80% performance uplift versus the Radeon 780M iGPU, based on the RDNA 2 core architecture, at the same power.
Here's a demo of Baulders Gate 3 running at 1080p hovering around 30FPS, which is perfectly playable! https://t.co/ZieiHtzRlN pic.twitter.com/VvFKbUVK5J
— Devin Arthur (@Lexcyn) March 25, 2024
Now we have an actual demonstration of a reference Snapdragon X Elite laptop running an actual game. The video captured by Devin Arthur (@Lexcyn) showcases the laptop running Baldur's Gate 3 at 1080p (quality settings are unknown). The laptop manages around 25-30 FPS & while that could mean nothing since we don't know the exact settings or power configurations for this laptop, the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS with its Radeon 780M iGPU produces around 25-40 FPS when set at a TDP of 30W.
So what we can say right now is that in its early stages, the performance of the Adreno GPU on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite CPU still has some ways to go. We are going to see much better performance after launch as the real driver work commences to optimize GPU performance across a range of games and applications. The X Elite and X Plus CPUs are expected to ship by the mid of 2024 with availability in 2H 2024 so expect more information soon.
2024 AI PC Platforms
| Brand Name | Intel | AMD | Intel | AMD | Qualcomm | Apple |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU Name | Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200" | Strix "Ryzen AI 300" | Meteor Lake "Core Ultra 100" | Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" | Snapdragon X Elite | M3 |
| CPU Architecture | x86 | x86 | x86 | x86 | ARM | ARM |
| CPU Process | 3nm (N3B) | 4nm (N4P) | 7nm (Intel 4) | 4nm (N4) | 4nm | 3nm |
| Max CPU Cores | 8 Cores | 12 Cores | 16 Cores | 8 Cores | 12 Cores | 16 Cores (MAX) |
| NPU Architecture | NPU | XDNA 2 NPU | NPU | XDNA 1 NPU | Hexagon NPU | In-House |
| Total AI TOPS | 120 TOPs (48 TOPS NPU) | 85 TOPS (55 TOPS NPU) | 34 TOPS (11 TOPS NPU) | 38 TOPS (16 TOPS NPU) | 75 TOPS (Peak) | 18 TOPS |
| GPU Architecture | Battlemage Arc Xe2-LPG | RDNA 3+ | Alchemist Arc Xe-LPG | RDNA 3 | Adreno GPU | In-House |
| Max GPU Cores | 8 Xe-Cores | 12 Compute Units | 8 Xe-Cores | 12 Compute Units | TBD | 40 Cores |
| GPU TFLOPs | TBD | 11.9 TFLOPs | ~4.5 TFLOPS | 8.9 TFLOPS | 4.6 TFLOPS | TBD |
| Memory Support (Max) | LPDDR5X | LPDDR5X-7500 | LPDDR5X-7467 | LPDDR5X-7500 | LPDDR5X-8533 | LPDDR5-6400 |
| Availability | 2H 2024 | 2H 2024 | Q4 2023 | Q1 2024 | Mid-2024 | Q4 2024 |
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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