Qualcomm refines Windows on Arm gaming with broad feature release — platform gets Snapdragon Control Panel, AVX2 emulation, improved anti-cheat support
The gaming experience on ARM is slowly making progress.
(Image credit: Qualcomm)
Qualcomm is upping the ante on gaming support for its Snapdragon X and upcoming X2 series chips. In a blog post, the ARM SoC manufacturer announced a new control panel, downloadable GPU driver updates, and improved anti-cheat support, including Denuvo and BattleEye.
The new control panel serves as the Snapdragon equivalent of the Nvidia App and the Adrenalin Edition application for Nvidia and AMD GPUs, respectively. The app treats you to four sub-menus: graphics, software, system info, and preferences. The graphics menu lists all of your installed games and enables you to change driver-related settings for that specific title, including upscaling, configuring a frame rate cap, anti-aliasing, texture filtering, and more.
In conjunction with the new control panel, Qualcomm's new downloadable graphics drivers can be accessed from the software menu. Qualcomm's driver program works similarly to Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs, by providing Snapdragon X series owners with up-to-date graphics drivers that feature bug fixes and game optimizations for games that are supported, as well as day-zero support for brand-new titles. For example, Qualcomm has added optimizations for Fortnite in its latest driver release v121.1, boosting performance in that game.
Qualcomm already has anti-cheat support built into its Snapdragon platform, but its latest update significantly expands the number of anti-cheat programs that work with its X-series ARM SoCs. Tencent's Anti-Cheat Expert, Robolox's Hyperion, Denuvo, InProtect GameGuard, BattleEye, and Uncheater are all now supported. Epic has also updated its Easy Anti-Cheat software to provide kernel-level anti-cheat capabilities for the Snapdragon platform.
Qualcomm is working to add AVX2 emulation to its Snapdragon Windows-compatible chips. The Snapdragon X2 Elite reportedly already supports AVX2 emulation, but outgoing Snapdragon X-series chips will get the update in the "coming weeks". This will help Snapdragon chips to run the growing number of AVX2 applications on Windows, which also include video games.
This latest update further solidifies Qualcomm's resolve to make the Windows gaming experience better on its Snapdragon Windows SoCs.
