Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite could beat Apple's M3 gaming performance — here's what we know
Qualcomm has made many promises about the highly anticipated Snapdragon X Elite chipset over the course of its lengthy pre-launch debut. From performance rivaling Apple's M3 chipset to a custom Chrome browser variant.
This latest look at the Snapdragon X Elite silicon sheds a light on what kind of gaming performance we can expect when the chipset finally hits the shelves later this year. Qualcomm is currently expected to ship the Snapdragon X Elite chipset in the second half of 2024.
In a video leaked on Twitter, we can see a Snapdragon X Elite laptop playing Baldur's Gate III with an average of about 30FPS at 1080p resolution.
Snapdragon X Elite gaming
As spotted by Notebook Check, the Snapdragon X Elite's gaming performance on Baldur's Gate III appears comparable to the Intel Arc iGPU and AMD Radeon 780M. The Snapdragon X Elite will have an integrated Qualcomm Adreno graphics card, so if it matches up with the integrated Intel Arc GPU and the Radeon 780M, that's still some pretty solid performance. 30 FPS on high-end gaming titles for an integrated graphcis card is nothing to sneeze at. Especially as the Snapdragon X Elite will be running those games on an emulated version of Windows x64.
Of course, BG3 doesn't have its own internal benchmarking tool, which means testing frame-rates using Baldur's Gate is far from ideal. But it is a wildly popular game so this video is a pretty good indication of how the chipset will fare for most users.
As Qualcomm has targeted Apple's custom silicon for previous comparisons it is worth noting that Baldur's Gate III is a cross-platform title. While the Apple M3 chips have the best gaming performance on Apple laptops to date, the Apple Macbook Air 13 M3 only averaged 41 FPS on Sid Mieier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm in our testing lab so the Snapdragon X Elite could easily outpace the base M3 chipset. We'll just have to wait to get the Snapdragon X Elite into our labs to do a fair comparison.
