Sounds promising. Work to do but that work will get done.
I played two games on this reference laptop. The first was something a bit simplistic, Redout II. This arcade-style game, which is pretty fast-paced, ran consistently at around 40 frames per second with 17% CPU utilization and 33% RAM usage, according to the Xbox Game Bar widget. Despite my bad racing skills and occasionally running into walls, my lap times were competitive in a single-player race, and I barely noticed any dropped frames.
In the second game, Control, Qualcomm’s reference laptop was able to push out about 35 frames per second. In scenes that got busy, particularly in the “Unknown Caller” chapter, there was some small lag, but it wasn’t anything that ruined gameplay. The Xbox Game Bar showed about 35 fps and 25% RAM usage in my gameplay.
I was in an event space, so I wasn’t able to complete gameplay on my own, but Qualcomm also Balder’s Gate 3 running at 30 frames per second. I observed as other media members played around with the game, and it was pretty impressive. No dropped frames, and RAM and CPU usage were pretty even with my own experiences with the previous titles.
The only issue I noticed was the fans kicking in during gameplay. This is to be presumed with a laptop without a GPU, but it could also be because these devices were running in a showroom scenario, where they are under high stress.
Qualcomm provided some benchmark claims that can show why my experience was so good. It claims that the GPU onboard the Snapdragon X Elite is 36% faster than the Arc graphics on Intel’s Core Ultra 155H chip when running at 20W of power. It also claimed the chip consumes 50% less power, one of the hallmarks of Arm-based chips.