Snapdragon 8 Elite paves the way for improved PC game emulation on mobile devices

Right after Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite became official, a good number of Chinese smartphone manufacturers announced new flagship phones. Most of these next-gen smartphones are set to launch in China within October, and many of them could make their way to the global market within 2024 or early 2025.

As for the SoC itself, Qualcomm promised big performance upgrades, and the recent benchmark runs suggest that the SoC indeed offers a noticeable leap over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. A new 3DMark Steel Nomad Light benchmark result has even shown that the Adreno 830 GPU of the Snapdragon 8 Elite can beat the Radeon 780M, the iGPU inside gaming handhelds like the ROG Ally X and Legion Go (curr. $499.99 on Amazon).

What makes matters even more interesting is that the Director of Engineering at Qualcomm has shared that the Snapdragon 8 Elite has Linux support. This support being available from day one is great news for game emulation. Worth noting that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is already quite good at playing PC games with Winlator and Mobox.

For example, as ETA Prime has demonstrated, the Galaxy S24 Ultra can play games like Fallout 4, Bioshock Remastered, and Far Cry at playable frame rates. With proper Linux support, things can be even better for the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite phones.

Of course, you won't get the full performance with an emulation layer in the middle. However, now that the hardware is capable, it will only take Qualcomm to convince developers to port their games to Android.