Qualcomm officially announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite less than a week ago, and it didn’t take long for the Linux kernel team to roll out various patches for the chipset. While future patches are on the cards that will cater to the GPU’s needs, this largely means the SoC can run PC games using emulation, where running titles native to the platform may take some time.
It will also be possible to run professional PC applications on devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite thanks to “day one” Linux support.
Qualcomm’s engineering director made a post that was spotted by @richard_miller On the Unfortunately, this means that there will be some performance left on the table, as there are only a few newer titles available on Android. It may also take a long time for Qualcomm to convince developers to put some effort into porting these games, so the best alternative for now is emulation.
3DMark Steel Nomad Light benchmarking showed that the Snapdragon 8 Elite is more powerful than AMD’s Radeon 780M running the ASUS ROG Ally, meaning it’s more than capable of running AAA games, albeit with some visual settings turned down. On the subject of This change will enable many mobile devices and tablets to support professional computer applications, which is already done in some iPad models.
@cozy_OSS @4k_isn It looks like the Elite 8 already has full Linux support on day one (which means the PC emulator won’t have issues with it) while for the GPU side, Turnip seems to be working on some patches pic.twitter.com/3v2A2VpzIj
– Richard Miller (@Richard_Milier) October 26, 2024
While it’s undoubtedly impressive to see how far Qualcomm has come, there are a significant number of changes needed. The company certainly did wonders on the hardware front when it unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite, but the software space is yet to be fully explored. We hope to hear some positive developments in AAA games running on this platform and more.
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