We Tried Gaming on The Surface Pro 11 (Windows ARM using the new snapdragon)

In this video we put the new Snapdragon Elite ARM CPU to the test for gaming. How do you think these new chips will fare?

*RELATED SNAPDRAGON VIDEOS*

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If there is anything you want us to cover on these new snapdragon chips let me know in the comments as we have a lot of content coming over the next two weeks

*TIMESTAMPS*
0:00:00 - Intro
0:01:00 - Benchmarks
0:02:17 - Gaming
0:03:56 - Conclusion

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#microsoft #surface

[ninjatogo]

You should have made note of the model of the chip. There's not just one version of the Snapdragon X Elite. In the case of the version being used in this Surface, your screenshots show that it''s the X1E-80-100, which isn't the top end model in terms of GPU power, and has slightly lower boost clocks than the top tier model.

[thantzinaung]

Reviewers always forgive Mac Air for not capable to play games becoz they are not meant to play games, for day-to-day tasks, but now they are starting to complain about Why SD chips are not capable to play games. Gg

[nitrobear]

I suppose many of these issues may be caused by the lack of AVX2 support on these device's emulators. It's something that Apple just now implemented in macOS Sequoia, so...

[eazi]

Why would i be disappointed when theses games are optimized currently for it? Games that were optimized ran well. Some benchmarks aren't even optimized for the chip yet. As developers do their part more games will become playable. The gpu as powerful as an xbox series x so it's more than capable. I'm loving mines thus far!!

[JackedtheTs]

FINALLY!... Been looking for someone who has tried WoW on one of these! Do you recall the settings? Resolution and detail level? This is really the only game I play.

[RobertDunn]

Yeah, I did not really have any high hopes for gaming with these devices.

You could make a video trying native ports of console emulators like Dolphin on Windows on ARM and see how those fare.

[davidlane]

I'm just happy Windows on ARM is gonna be a thing. Give it a few years and we'll see a much wider adoption as the demand for ARM compatibility increases.

It's about time we have full PCs with good battery life and efficiency. Android and Apple had their time to fill that space by making their mobile operating systems more competent as PC replacements, but google and, especially, apple keep holding back

[gregorywilson]

Looks like Lunar Lake still has a chance. It’s all about the apps. Some apps just don’t won’t run.

[kensyre]

football manager running on these would change my life

[KngJseph]

Great review, I was expecting alot more from the Pro 11, especially for the processing power and the price tag, shows how much I know about benchmarks and stats in general!

[Gementa]

Thanks for the informative review, my experience was the same with the X Elite on Surface Pro 11.

I bought my Surface Pro 11 the other day and returned it on the same day. Most of my games were unplayable and I had some essential apps that wasn't supported, such as Google Drive and other PC tools that I need quite often for my work.

I think Arm laptops will be worth it in ~2 years when there's more support for Arm.

The very few games that Surface Pro 11 did manage to run, my Surface Pro 8 ended up running those games better. I wish Microsoft made an AMD version of the Surface Pro as an alternative option.

[fouda]

Granted that the surface pro was never marketed as a gaming machine, I downloaded divinity original sin 2 and company of heroes and they both ran much better than they did on my surface pro 9

[invisibleman]

I really want to see the performance in editing and graphic design softwares.

[kipters]

something REALLY important about how this emulation works is that it always sucks on the first run. It's a JIT compiler, so the first time it encounters a piece of code it will have to recompile it. The second time it will use the cached version. I don't know about Prism but some compilers will further optimize the JITted code over time, after profiling the code itself

[winhteinlin]

We buy these laptops for work, I am not sure why we even talk about gaming. I was hoping to hook up with wide screens and let see when it is deliver

[catgirl_eva]

It's disappointing to see the lack of gaming performance in these new devices, but I guess it was to be expected. When has the Surface ever been a gaming powerhouse? I mean, sure, the models with discrete graphics could do it, but those also have a far more hefty pricetag.

[JeffKirvin]

Try this. For each game or benchmark, go into Windows display settings and turn on Auto Super Resolution. This allows the GPU to render the game at a lower resolution/higher framerate, then use the NPU to AI upscale each frame to a higher resolution. Every single reviewer I've seen has failed to mention this, and it's like saying a sports car has poor performance when you never use the turbocharger.

Also, the anti-cheat stuff has already been fixed. Update Windows to the latest build and try again.

[Tugennov]

Are there any games optimized for Windows on ARM? If so, which games? Thanks for the video!

[shirokuro]

Great video! I got the Surface Laptop 7 yesterday, S11Elite(X1E-80-100)/16/512 and so far quite happy with it. This may sound dumb, but a big reason I wanted one was to get the same flawless sleep/wake performance as on an M-series Mac. And so far, it does!! This is such a fundamental thing, but I have NEVER trusted sleep/wake on Windows devices. x86 could never nail this for decades. Anyway, gaming. The only game I tried so far is World of Warcraft which, as you said, is compiled for arm64. It runs flawlessly! In a Dragonflight region, at full resolution, with rendering resolutions set to 50% and game settings at 5, I was getting around 47fps. I could probably push 60 if I lowered things, but it was completely playable. I don't intend anything more than light gaming on it anyway, but it'll be nice to see what works and what doesn't. I have other things to test, most importantly there are some specialized applications we use for work, which require some drivers, if those don't work, it might push me to return the machine, but we'll see.

[FirlowXD]

Im currently looking for a new device, and this one looks great. Im only looking for "light" gaming though - indies, The Sims, etc, mainly for a small device to be able to plug into a monitor when needed, for writing, light video editing, photo editing. This looks good.