Best Games to play on Snapdragon X1

So you think you were unfortunate or had a bad choice when purchasing that Snapdragon X1 laptop? If you are a gamer, there is still a lot of fun to be had on these.

One issue I will point out is that currently Adreno drivers can have issues with fullscreen on some games. When selected, if you lower the resolution it will render the native resolution and a window inside it. This does not occur with all titles but is frequent.

This means if some game requires you to lower resolution for full performance, that will produce a smaller image in fullscreen or windowed mode. Alternatives like FSR seems to work well, if the game supports it.

Given this fullscreen problem, playing on a laptop that is much higher than 1080p may require manually lowering the resolution on the Windows Settings panel and let it do the scaling.

This will be my evolving list of games that run great on Snapdragon Windows on ARM.

Counter Strike 2

CS2 is playable with recent drivers but performance can be a bit low on Adreno X1-45 devices, which would be the ones with X1P-42 or below.

My recommendation is to lower the resolution until it hits that 60FPS target and turn VSync to Off, so that the screen still updates when there is some slight delay.

It should run very well on higher end devices with the X1-85 GPU.

While Qualcomm doesn't work further on the drivers, it is one of the few games that is fully Anti Cheat compatible. Hence this is why it is on the list.

List continues after the link.

Dead Space 2

A classic for horror game fans, Dead Space 2 requires to set "Strict Self-Modifying Code" under emulations settings.

1080p60 is possible and overall it plays great.

Otherwise, the 2nd game does not suffer from API problems that Dead Space 1 has. It sometimes caps to 30 running VSync and has many issues with fullscreen modes on modern and not so modern cards. That one might also be worth a try, when used in conjunction with dgVoodoo2.

Half-Life 2

One of the greatest FPS ever produced, this one runs smoothly without any issue.

Low end X1 users can fully enjoy this game with anti aliasing, high details and 1080p60.

I didn't notice any bugs than were not already present on x86 devices, mostly minor things like interface scaling when toggling through the graphics settings.

Halo: Combat Evolved (MCC)

Another genre defining FPS, Halo CE is available on the Master Chief Collection for modern platforms. It mostly plays at 1080p60 out of the box, as long as Classic Visuals are used.

You wouldn't really want it any other way, as the remade graphics deter too much from original designs and even gameplay. If you did want it, 30 FPS is more common in open areas and it is possible to play through it.

Performance on Classic visuals can also go well above 60 FPS but some areas have performance drops. I have played it on a 120Hz display for the extra fluidity.

The experience is very good and I cannot recommend it enough if you like this type of game.

Resident Evil 2 Remake

This one needs quite a big of tweaking but is such a good game I would have to recommend it. It has been a commercial success that has earned it over 18M copies sold.

Graphics settings for the X1-45 GPU are as follows:

• Resolution 1920x1080
• Anti-aliasing: TAA
• FSR set to Quality
• VSync off if on 60Hz displays, Variable refresh + Vsync otherwise,
• Low shadows, contact shadows, reflections and ambient occlusion,
• Low particle rendering.

With these settings the game renders at 720p and upscales. Image is a bit soft but the game plays well, with some very open areas dropping to 30 FPS.

TAA has to be enabled due to the presence of a forced sharpning filter. Game looks extremely aliased if that is not the case.

The game would look much better with TAA on interlaced rendering, with similar or slightly better performance. Unfortunately, it randomly crashes the GPU process. If QC fixes this, that would be recommended as it looks more like native rendering that FSR does.

As a point of comparison, the game seems to run better overall than a Radeon Vega 7 iGPU on desktop chips. They are similar in throughput, so I would say it is a bright spot for the Adreno GPU.

Streets of Rage 4

A new classic in it's own right, SoR4 plays as smoothly as you could expect from what is a very well optimized game that runs on a boat load of iGPUs.

Works out of the box, all detail to the maximum and I have experienced no crash or rendering problems.

Just leave the API at default and you are in for a good time, alone or with a friend. 

The Dolphin Emulator

This one is not really a game but is an honorable mention. The reason is that Dolphin fully supports DX12 and has an ARM64 native port. (I tried the native RPCS3 but that just crashed...)

Performance is very good and it seems to be similar in rendering to a much more powerful Radeon 290 card I had a while back.

If you are a fan of the Gamecube library, grab a USB adapter for your original controllers and you are in for a good experience.

Any controller will do mind you, but the original ones support "trigger click" that will make it easier to play some system native games. Try it out.