I have recently purchased an Acer laptop equipped with the Snapdragon X1P-26. I wanted to try out the new devices and see if Microsoft has made significant improvements to the experience.
Software
My findings is that for most work, it is great and very fast. Edge and Chrome have native ARM64 versions and performance is very good. Office 365 and most of the Microsoft productivity apps also have native versions.
Even Adobe Photoshop is possible now. Only thing missing there seems to be some old plugins. Adobe has a very
big page on the matter, that goes to great lengths explaining what does or does not work.
I'd say generally, native support is now in a good place and I have not found rendering issues on desktop apps. It seems to be the focus (compared to gaming) and I don't think you would otherwise know it is not an x86 device.
It is also a low power and low noise laptop, considering the compute capabilities. My biggest complaint is that the fans on this Acer could idle more since the CPU never seems to exceed 60ºC and sometimes has fan turned on at 52ºC - strange.
Printers and Peripherals
Printers work as you expect, if they are of the network connected variety. USB printers may need drivers but companies like Epson have a
dedicated page about it and have already released some ARM64 versions.
HP seems to be quite behind on this but network printers work under a network protocol that does not require drivers.
Other peripherals like Smart Card readers may be more of a problem if there are no drivers.
Gaming
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| Sonic Frontiers on the X1 Plus |
I have found that when it comes to the latest updates, the Prism x86 emulator seems to do a great job of getting even games working. As you can see above, Sonic Frontiers is completely broken but this seems to be more of an issue with the Adreno driver - it is not the only game.
Steam only has an x86-64 version but it works fine. Seems to push the CPU quite a bit when downloading but I have found it very stable and have no issue with it.
It has been more the case that games work rather than not. What does not work at this time is Anti Cheat software.
I also leave a few examples of games that require emulation fixes or patches:
- Burnout Paradise (original) - fails with an SSE2 check that seems to bypass the emulator,
- Dead Space 2 - exe requires "Strict Self-Modifying Code" under emulations settings,
- Red Faction Guerilla (original) has Ambient Occlusion bugs and low performance overall.
- Sonic Adventure - has low perf and stutters (use D3D8to9)
The biggest problem is that there are many games with poor performance, artifacts or crashes that seem related to a rather poor Adreno driver:
- DirectX8 or older performance is not good (can happen with modern GPUs also).
- DirectX10 and 11 seem to be hit or miss or have artifacts.
- Vulkan driver does not exist and translates to DX12. It can produce artifacts.
You can check PCGamingWiki for the API of the game.
Games with graphics bugs:
- Borderlands (original version)
- Forza Horizon 4 (same as SF)
- Resident Evil 2 - crashes if using interlaced rendering, FSR is blurry but works.
So for these there is not much to do. This seems an Adreno issue but I do not have the tools to confirm.
I wish to expand on this list when I am through with testing. Let me know your experiences if you have one of these devices.
The DirectX12 driver seems to have performance on par with what AMD is doing. Stability is also better and in the case of Pre-DX10 games, the best way is to use
dgVoodoo2 for better performance and stability.
dgVoodoo2 has a special "ARM64_chpe_x86" layer that targets x86 32bit games and is what you should use. An example game for this is Vanquish, which is rather unplayable but close to 60fps with this software.
Red Faction Guerilla also needs dgVoodoo2 for good performance.
Sometimes if the performance is ok but it is a DX8 game that stutters,
D3D8to9 seems to fix most of the problems. It is more straightforward than using dgVoodoo2.
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