World of Warcraft Classic and Retail on Snapdragon X Elite Windows on ARM
I've tested WoW performance on Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite dev kit equipped with 32GB of RAM and best bin of the SoC (better boost clocks, TDP).
x86 emulation vs native Arm64 game
Let's start with something more fun - World of Warcraft native Arm64 version versus x86_64 run with emulation on the mini PC. Retail WoW (The War Within) x86 crashed on launch (showing a crash report screen), while Classic Cataclysm and Anniversary did manage to run.
Without retail WoW running I'm missing more detailed data comparison (single core, GPU, mixed bottlenecks) but still the results are surprising (1080p, mode 3):
The x86 client achieves from 53% to 65% FPS of the native Arm64 version (just note that FPS on a clump of players is not 1:1 as player count changes slightly between tests).
World of Warcraft native benchmarks
WoW was very quick to offer a native Apple Silicon version with a surprising Windows on ARM version following soon after. The game runs really well on 1080p low settings.
In mass-combat and/or mass-player scenarios single-core performance becomes the limiting factor when then game has to handle way more complex world state
around the player:
I also tested two older Windows on ARM devices at the launch of WoW Dragonflight and here is a comparison (old data with TWW data for X Elite):
Final Fantasy XIV
FFXIV is not available as native and will run emulated. On the older WoA devices, it had problems running but on Snapdragon X Elite it does work and the performance seems to be enough for the game to be playable.
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