Microsoft Details Gaming Advances in Windows on Arm

With the release this week of the first Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft is detailing the work it did to improve the gaming experience with features like Prism emulation, Auto SR super-resolution upscaling, anti-cheat compatibility, and its partnership with Linaro to help document how well specific games work on the platform.

“Windows 11 24H2 includes many new capabilities that utilize the high-performance hardware of Copilot+ PCs and new software optimizations,” Microsoft’s Jay DiFuria writes. “Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 PCs, including Arm-powered devices that are powered by the Snapdragon X Series. [They] have cutting-edge new processing power coming from the CPU, GPU, and NPU (neural processing unit). This new hardware, in combination with innovations in Windows 11, is a step forward for Arm gaming.”

Prism is the emulator that runs when you launch an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) Windows app or game on a Windows 11 on Arm-based PC: It automatically converts the underlying code to Arm64 without requiring developers to do anything. Prism is a major advance over the previous emulator, Microsoft says, and when combined with other advances, like the dramatically more powerful Snapdragon X processors and Auto SR, it allows modern games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which utilizes DirectX 11, to run flawlessly.

I wrote about Auto SR earlier this month, but the anti-cheat functionality is a big deal since so many Windows games require software like BattlEye, Denuvo Anti-Cheat, and Wellbia XIGNCODE3/UNCHEATER to prevent cheating. According to Microsoft, this problem has been solved on Windows 11 on Arm 24H2 as well: Each of these solutions is now available for your Copilot+ PC, all you have to do is update to the latest version, build 26100.863 (which you’ve done, since it was forced on you during the Out-of-Box Experience).

Microsoft is also highlighting the work it and Qualcomm have done with Linaro to document how well individual game titles work in Windows 11 on Arm on Snapdragon X-based PCs. You can visit the Windows on Arm Ready Software website to learn more, but over 1200 PC games now support a “good” experience on these PCs–meaning they work and run at 30 fps or higher at 1080p–and over 1400 PC games have been validated to work.

This work is all rather incredible: For now, at least, only Snapdragon X-based PCs offer this level of performance in what is essentially an Ultrabook-class PC. To get this type of performance on an x86/x64-based PC, you would need a dedicated graphics card of some kind, and even then, most don’t rise to this challenge at these prices or in this type of laptop. For example, I’ve been playing Doom Eternal on a modern Ultrabook with an Nvidia RTX A500 laptop GPU, and it runs well enough, but only at 1280 x 720. And that’s native code, not emulated.