WoW Dragonflight PTR and Classic on Windows on ARM devices

There are few Windows on ARM devices with Qualcomm ARM CPUs plus a few user-converted Android phones or tablets. Those are mostly higher-power variants of mobile phone chips so the performance isn't great but at least the devices are fanless and have quite long battery life. Let's see how they handle ARM-native WoW.

Windows on ARM devices

For the tests I used Pipo W12 tablet with Snapdragon 850, 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of eMMC storage and Lenovo IdeaPad 4G LTE 82KE000JGE with Snapdragon 8cx, 8GB of RAM and 256 M.2 SSD.

Snapdragon 850 has Adreno 630 integrated graphics while the 8cx has much better Adreno 680, yet both chips aren't that performant.

WoW has native ARM versions of their retail and both Classic clients. The Classic games do have lower requirements so you can expect Classic Era and WoTLK to run better than Dragonflight on WoA device.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks were done at 1080p resolution, mode 1 (lowest settings) on 10.0.0 (46181) ARM version (Dragonflight PTR) on Windows 11.

Adreno 680 should offer close to 2x the performance of Adreno 630 and in GPU-focused test scenarios, we can see that (Ardenweald, Stonard, empty Karazan). In Oribos and Dalaran where there is more complexity in terms of asset loading and the geometry to render the uplift is much smaller.

Mass combat benchmark usually tests single core limitations of the game (raids, battlegrounds) but in this case, also simple particle effects play a role, and as you can see both Qualcomm chips aren't that capable. You can even see how FPS increases by a lot after the combat ends and mobs despawn.

The game is rather playable, I didn't see any hard stuttering, however, this is on the lowest settings and still struggling to hit 30 FPS. Going with a lower resolution will also help. You can treat Windows on ARM devices as your quick mobile access to the game to do some light non-competitive content.

And in Classic Era even the Snapdragon 850 can handle it pretty well:

I had some crashes while testing this, the same as some other player recently reported on the NA forums. I had hard crashes in Bastion and soft crashes in newer zones of Retail but also in Classic Era - the game would crash and re-launch but after that, it would offer lower FPS and would have to be restarted to have nominal performance.

On top of that at the time of writing this article there is a bug where WoTLK ARM executable is missing but should be back soon as Blizzard is already aware of this.