Last year Qualcomm promised that games would “just work” on its Snapdragon X Elite laptops, but in my testing I found that was far from the case. Now, a year later, Windows on Arm is much more ready for gaming, thanks to emulator improvements, driver updates, a new Snapdragon Control Panel, and Qualcomm’s work on anti-cheat compatibility.
Qualcomm is releasing its Snapdragon Control Panel this week, which automatically detects the games you have installed on your Snapdragon X Elite laptop and then optimizes them. It’s similar to the apps that AMD and Nvidia use for their own GPUs, with settings for framerate caps, anti-aliasing, texture filtering, and more.
The Snapdragon Control Panel also allows you to install the latest Adreno GPU drivers, which are optimized for the latest games to improve stability and performance. Qualcomm says it has made fixes and improvements for more than 100 games since its launch last year, continuing to address bug fixes for stability and performance.
With the Snapdragon Control Panel release, both Microsoft and Qualcomm have also made some important changes to help with PC gaming on Windows on Arm. Microsoft’s Prism emulator now supports x86 Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), which is essential for many games and creative apps. Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 Elite chips also support AVX2 emulation, and existing Snapdragon
Microsoft also recently updated its Xbox app on Windows on Arm to add the ability to download ARM64 compatible games. When CoPilot Plus PC launched last year, the Xbox app was simply a portal to Xbox cloud gaming. It didn’t have library or store options, so you couldn’t use it to install games from PC Game Pass. All that has changed now.
Qualcomm is also working with Epic Games Fortnite Running on Windows on Arm, with full kernel-level anti-cheat support. You will need the latest Adreno GPU driver to get Fortnite is underway, and Qualcomm says it’s also working with other anti-cheat providers like Tencent’s Anti-Cheat Expert, Roblox’s Hyperion, Denuvo, InProtect GameGuard, UnCheater, and BattleEye to enable more multiplayer games on Windows on Arm.