Pc Gaming On Arm Chips Didn't Quite Happen In 2025, But The Die Is...

There's a veritable CPU Arm-y marching towards the PC.

Arm versus x86 is a battle for the ages. And 2025 was meant to be the year that Arm chips finally made inroads into the PC and indeed PC gaming. That should have been thanks to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X CPU, which looked very promising at launch and ought to have been getting into its stride this year.

That clearly hasn't happened. And yet there are several unambiguous signs that the Arm revolution on the PC may well be imminent. Yes, for real this time. What's more, modern Arm CPUs look very compelling on paper. When it comes to single-core performance, all the indications are that they are actually superior to x86. And single-core performance is particularly important for gaming.

Anyway, if the Snapdragon X has been a disappointment, that's perhaps as much down to unrealistic expectations as it is any failings of Snapdragon X or Arm CPUs more generally. In other words, if Arm is to take a big chunk of the PC market, or even overtake x86, that is never going to happen overnight.

So, where exactly are we when it comes to Arm on the PC and particularly gaming on Arm? For now, Qualcomm is the only major player in Arm chips for the PC, though Apple's M silicon is relevant, too, and Nvidia is literally just about to get in on the game, more on which in a moment.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Arm CPUs for the PC were released in spring 2024 with some very bold promises regarding gaming performance. Undoubtedly, that gaming pitch from Qualcomm was a big mistake and set expectations that were never going to be met.

The problem was and is multifold. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, there are very few proper PC games that are compiled natively for Arm chips. That means gaming on Arm PCs right now means emulating x86 code on Arm CPU cores.

That, in turn, means Qualcomm is dependent on Microsoft and its Prism emulation layer for Windows on Arm. The other major limitation is that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips are essentially low-power mobile SoCs with integrated graphics.

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To cut a long story short, the Adreno GPU in the first generation Snapdragon X chips isn't terrible. But even by the standards of integrated graphics, it offers decent rather than remarkable raw rendering power.

Source: PC Gamer