- Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC can run demanding PC games like Cyberpunk 2077.
- Qualcomm is working on native Linux support for the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which will further boost gaming performance by eliminating emulation overhead.
- The ability to run high-end PC games on mobile challenges the traditional gaming market.
We already knew that the Snapdragon 8 Elite was powerful, and now it has proven itself by being able to run Cyberpunk 2077. And yes, we are talking about the PC version.
This is achieved through emulation, which adds more merit since performance is lost in this emulation. So, the milestone marked by Qualcomm’s new top-of-the-range SoC for smartphones is still impressive.
Even more interesting is that Qualcomm is working on native support for the Linux operating system. This would make it much easier to play PC games while losing less performance along the way. Soon, it will be widespread to see well-known gaming smartphones running games initially designed for PC and console.
Why it matters: This will change the gaming landscape, and of course, it poses a new risk for the growing market of portable consoles with x86 hardware.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Powers PC Gaming on Mobile
That’s right. We can now see a short video via LetCook of a smartphone with a Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC fluidly running Cyberpunk 2077. The game runs at 1280 x 720 pixels (HD) resolution with the graphic quality set to Low. The greatest merit is that it was achieved with a stable performance of 60 FPS.
For reference, an ASUS ROG Ally can run this game between 40 and 60 FPS but at 1080p resolution. Now, it also helps to use the AMD FSR upscaling technology in Quality Mode and activating Turbo Mode, generating higher energy consumption than this mobile SoC.
It should be remembered that this is with emulation in between. In benchmarks, it had already been seen that the Adreno GPU of the Snapdragon 8 Elite was superior to the AMD Radeon 780M used by the ROG Ally, so this performance in Cyberpunk 2077 is not surprising. And even more so when we could see other games run with this SoC, such as Black Myth: Wukong or Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.
In the second video published, we can see that the Snapdragon 8 Elite can run Cyberpunk 2077 at 60 FPS under any circumstance. That even includes driving through the city, which is very demanding.
The game does not stop running at 60 FPS at all times, which indicates that it has even more performance under the hood that would allow it to increase the resolution or make some graphical adjustments to improve the visual quality.
Obviously, and for obvious reasons, the game is running LetCook Ray Tracing technology—something where the recommended requirements are to use an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 graphics card.
Just as no portable console can run this game with Ray Tracing, if the ASUS ROG Ally already struggles to run it without this technology and with rescaling, you can, i.e. that the game will become unplayable by activating it.
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[Editor-in-Chief]
Sajjad Hussain is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Tech4Gamers.com. Apart from the Tech and Gaming scene, Sajjad is a Seasonal banker who has delivered multi-million dollar projects as an IT Project Manager and works as a freelancer to provide professional services to corporate giants and emerging startups in the IT space.
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