‘It’s Moving Slower Than We Want.’ Qualcomm's Still Trying to Figure Out PC Gaming

PC gaming has become Qualcomm’s white whale. The company wouldn’t put it in those terms, but it’s clear the company wants users to know its new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip will be gaming capable. It’s far from the ideal, and Qualcomm seems to know it. It wants to show off the new chip’s GPU abilities, but for one of the most common uses of graphics processing, Qualcomm will still be behind everyone else.

The looming elephant in the room is the chip microarchitecture Qualcomm is beholden to. Whereas Intel and AMD use x86, Snapdragon is based on ARM. Whatever PC you buy with a Snapdragon X2 chip will run into game compatibility issues. While Qualcomm claims it has 1,400 games optimized for Snapdragon, the actual list of modern AAA titles is relatively small. During its Snapdragon Sum