While Microsoft’s new CoPilot+ PCs offer top performance for AI tasks, they struggle to run popular PC games, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The Copilot+ PCs are powered by Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chips that include the CPU, GPU, and a Neural Processing Unit. By using an Arm chips in the place of Intel processors, Microsoft’s PCs now into some of the same problems faced by users of Apple’s Macs with Apple Silicon, such as an inability to run popular PC games designed for the x86 chip architecture. Approximately 15 percent of PC laptop users are gamers.
Microsoft did come up with a way to get around this issue. The Redmond firm’s “Prism” does basically what Apple’s Rosetta 2 does on the Mac, allowing the Arm-based machines to run apps designed for the X86 platform. Unfortunately, Prism does not do well when it comes to running Windows games. In a test of 1,300 PC games, only half of the games ran without bugs, glitches, or launch issues.
The anti-cheating software used in games like Fortnite and League of Legends can’t be translated to run on Arm, meaning the games will not run on Microsofts new PCs. Currently, there is no fix available for the problem.
There are other Windows apps that have problems on the Copilot+ PCs. A report from The Verge, says Adobe Premiere Pro was “practically unusable” and that rendering projects in Blender was “terrible.” Meanwhile, Shadows of the Tomb Raider crashed on a regular basis, and other title would not even launch, including such titles as Halo Infinite, Destiny 2, and Fall Guys.
Microsoft told The Wall Street Journal that while the Redmond firm is aiming to make a “quality gaming experience” on its new Copilot+ devices, players who want a high-performance experience should choose another PC.