Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips have helped lead the market for laptops with epically long battery life, but they’ve had a key weakness: games. To help address this, Qualcomm said Thursday that it will enable the hit multiplayer game Fortnite to run on Snapdragon, as well as Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat software.
The latter service is probably the more important of the two. Epic, as well as many other multiplayer games, requires that anti-cheat software be added to prevent cheating. But it doesn’t have to be just present — it should run at the kernel level to minimize the CPU consumption such services provide.
Qualcomm says that it has done just that. Fortnite should be available to Windows on Arm devices later this year that are powered by Snapdragon chips, and Qualcomm said that it was “working” with Epic to bring Easy Anti-Cheat to the platform as well.
To date, the vast majority of games run on X86 CPUs, rather than Windows on Arm. Qualcomm is obviously looking to change that. A few games do work — Control, for example — and Qualcomm has said that it is continually working on ensuring compatibility between popular games and its processors. Qualcomm, though, hasn’t really supported its aggressive position from a year ago that most games should run on the Snapdragon X Elite. Now, its stance is more that the optimization process will never really be completed.
Compatibility with fundamental “platform” services like Easy Anti-Cheat will help that, however.
“Hundreds of today’s multiplayer games—including Fortnite—rely on Easy Anti-Cheat to counter hacking and cheating in multiplayer PC games,” Qualcomm said. “In addition to releasing Windows on Snapdragon anti-cheat support for Fortnite we will bring this support to developers through an Epic Online Services SDK release. This will enable developers using Easy Anti-Cheat to bring this compatibility to their own games. “
To its credit, Qualcomm has quickly moved to address areas where third-party software didn’t run on its own processors, such as app like Google Drive and some VPNs. Dave Durnil, the global head of gaming and Snapdragon Studios, told reporters on a call Thursday that the company has worked with other anti-cheat services like BattleEye and the anticheat technology built into Roblox.
“We’re all in on gaming — PC gaming.” Durnil said,
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.