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 on, Windows on Arm is a lot 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 games you’ve installed on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop and then optimizes them. It’s very similar to the apps that AMD and Nvidia use for their own GPUs, with settings for frame rate caps, anti-aliasing, texture filtering, and much 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 launch last year, with continued bug fixes for stability and performance.
Alongside the Snapdragon Control Panel release, both Microsoft and Qualcomm have also made some significant changes to help PC gaming on Windows on Arm. Microsoft’s Prism emulator now supports x86 Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), which are required by many games and creative apps. Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 Elite chips also support AVX2 emulation, and existing Snapdragon X series devices “will also receive the update in coming weeks.”
Microsoft has also updated its Xbox app on Windows on Arm recently to add the ability to download ARM64 compatible games. When Copilot Plus PCs 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. That’s all changed now.
Qualcomm has also been working with Epic Games to get Fortnite running on Windows on Arm, with full kernel-level anti-cheat support. You’ll need the latest Adreno GPU driver to get Fortnite running, 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.
All of these improvements are a much better start for gaming on Windows on Arm than the launch last year, but performance and compatibility is still far from perfect. You can check to see if your favorite game runs natively, via emulation, or not at all right here.
