Native versus emulation - World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
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At the beginning of the year, I tested the Snapdragon X Elite unreleased dev-kit, and I couldn't really compare x86 versus native gaming performance for the same game. I only managed to get World of Warcraft Classic x86 to run, and when compared to the native version, the FPS drop was 40-60% in two simple benchmarks. WoW retail x86 did not work, but now with the latest Windows improvements and the Prism emulation layer, things have changed.
The tests were done on a Snapdragon X Elite dev kit equipped with X1E-00-1DE Snapdragon X Elite SoC (3.8 GHz with 4.3 GHz boost on 1-2 cores) and 32GB of RAM. The dev kit runs at a higher TDP than most, if not all, laptops and has the theoretically best bin of chips (highest boost clocks).
The key difference since my initial review is the Windows version. Microsoft was working hard on improving emulation performance and compatibility. Since Windows 11 24H2, there is a new emulator called Prism, and with recent updates it also got AVX instructions support to handle even more x86_64 applications.
For the tests I used Windows 11 25H2 26220.7344 Insider Preview version to get all possible improvements taken into account.
Additionally, the x86_64 binaries properties were edited to enable newer emulated CPU features :
WoW is an MMORPG, and it does not have a built-in benchmark. It can be reliably benchmarked to some extent if you use specific game areas/instances. You can check more in my WoW benchmarking section.
As a PC game, it's a modern DX12 game engine with optional ray-traced shadows support and a few other features. It offers native x86, Windows on ARM, and Apple Silicon versions. In my previous tests, the x86 retail version would not run on Snapdragon, and only the Classic version managed to run. The FPS drop versus the native version was massive of around 40-60% (but the testing wasn't as detailed as I would like).
With the Windows (and WoW) changes, both x86_64 WoW clients managed to run on Windows on ARM, allowing me to get way more test data. MSI Afterburner and other similar tools don't support WoA, so I had to use the game's built-in average FPS meter (which doesn't average over long periods of time; and no 1% lows/frame time graphs).
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