Microsoft's New AI Computers Struggle With Hundreds of Popular PC Games

[dozoy]

No ****. Completely different instruction set than what has been the norm for a long time. Windows on ARM is a different beast than normal x64_86.

 

[klasma]

Do ARM based PCs even support dGPUs at all? I know there aren’t any desktop chips yet, but what about an external NVidia GPU? I’m guessing there are no drivers…?

There aren’t any Snapdragon desktop PC CPUs yet. If and when they’ll eventually make ones with PCI slots (I wouldn’t hold my breath), then at least Linux may conceivably support them. But it’s not really on the horizon at present.

 

[mzeb]

I'll tell ya, I'm running a handful of AAA games via the GDTK on my M2 Max and they run very well... So that's cross architecture and cross platform. Running it on one of these machines would be running it just cross arch. Not a good look.

 

[AppleTO]

There aren’t any Snapdragon desktop PC CPUs yet. If and when they’ll eventually make ones with PCI slots (I wouldn’t hold my breath), then at least Linux may conceivably support them. But it’s not really on the horizon at present.

I was referring more to the Thunderbolt eGPU enclosures. Unless none of the ARM laptops have Thunderbolt. I guess that would answer that question.

 

[ProbablyDylan]

Chips not meant for gaming aren't good at gaming. More at 11.

 

[bollman]

I thought Apple missed the AI boat and lost the battle./s. Copilot and Gemini are both trash compared to other AI models of Open AI, Claude and Llama.

You are aware that CoPilot uses GPT-4 since MS invested billions of $$$ in Open AI?

 

[svish]

Normal PCs seem like a better buy.

 

[mistasopz]

Let's just slap AI onto everything these days and hope it sells. This fad is going to die out soon... just like 3D TV, the touchbar, and Samsung Bixby.

 

[Piggie]

I don't blame Microsoft or the need to change.

This HAD to happen, and I'm glad it has, for everyone.

What we need is the software creators to get a kick up the ass and make their software compatible as fast as possible.

 

[macfacts]

This has been the Parallels on ARM problem for years. Fortunately the more of the world that runs on ARM, the greater the reason for devs to care about the architecture. And thus gaming on Parallels might get better.

You can't take games made for windows on arm and install them on a apple silicon mac.

 

[aknabi]

If I were an enterprise customer I'd see poor gaming performance as a huge benefit 😂

 

[555gallardo]

As a game developer, I find it pretty obvious that these AI-first machines aren’t for gaming. It’s the same as for cars. You wouldn’t buy a Ferrari over an F-150 just because it has more horsepower.

 

[AndiG]

„In some cases, anti-cheating software in games like Fortnite and League of Legends can't be translated to run on Arm“ looks like a nice usecase for AI

 

[mattoruu]

Nobody is buying a productivity notebook PC to run games, come on.

Not buying specifically to play games. But of course people want to play games on their device (no matter what device it is).

Back in the day we used to play Mario on our TI-88 graphing calculators. Did any of us buy a graphing calculator to play games on it? Well… maybe some people did. But most of us needed it for classes… and THEN we started gaming on it.

 

[iPay]

Nobody is buying a productivity notebook PC to run games, come on.

Well, all Linux + some Apple users have a spare PC to run games. Now Window users will also have to! Microsoft sabotaging their own assets

 

[ItsASpider]

So... still less struggles than any macOS device regardless of SoC then? Why is this news? "x86 software doesn't run great on ARM hardware," whoa, groundbreaking information. At least unlike Macs, Windows developers will start to make their games work on ARM once that mass becomes large enough.

Regardless, nobody was buying laptops like these to play games even when they weren't ARM. Why suddenly move the goalpost at all now? Especially more casual games that people *did* run on machines like these will be much faster to start supporting ARM, not to mention that they probably also don't rely as heavily on anti-cheat (which is a big part of the problem here) and thus much less likely to not run.

I thought Apple missed the AI boat and lost the battle./s. Copilot and Gemini are both trash compared to other AI models of Open AI, Claude and Llama.

Sir, Copilot is literally Open AI's GPT model...

 

[applepotato666]

The seamless conversion from Intel to Apple Silicon is just one more example of how Apple really can do great things.

You must not have been there on launch day. Many apps did not work, and there was kernel panics aplenty. In December 2020 my M1 MacBook Pro would completely freeze with no response for a minute, repeating the same last second of whatever song was playing, then kernel panic - and that was at least 5 times a day.

Of course it’s fixed now, but it took time and Apple did not ship perfection on day 1. It took them until 2022 for the random kernel panics to completely stop.

 

[JippaLippa]

To be fair, these machines were never targeted at gamers, to begin with (just like macbooks aren't).

 

[russell_314]

Chips not meant for gaming aren't good at gaming. More at 11.

That was my first thought too. No one that’s looking for a gaming PC is going to buy this. The whole premise of the article is either clickbait or written by someone who doesn’t understand computers. It’s like an article saying “Sports cars struggle to pull RV trailers”

 

[Abazigal]

You must not have been there on launch day. Many apps did not work, and there was kernel panics aplenty. In December 2020 my M1 MacBook Pro would completely freeze with no response for a minute, repeating the same last second of whatever song was playing, then kernel panic - and that was at least 5 times a day.

Of course it’s fixed now, but it took time and Apple did not ship perfection on day 1. It took them until 2022 for the random kernel panics to completely stop.

I did get an M1 MBA on launch day, and it has been a smooth transition for me. Perhaps I just never ran into the gam-stopping bugs.

 

[russell_314]

Tbh I've never seen macrumors writing good stuff about windows. It's sad . Journalism should be objective, not self-approval oriented

The article isn’t even about Windows. it’s about a line of hardware using ARM processors. It’s not even something MacRumors wrote, but they are quoting a Wall Street Journal article.

 

[lenningj]

overpriced laptops

 

[mihighil]

I mean how can they expect these laptops to run games, they dont have a single RGB light 😩

 

[wanha]

Let’s be real here, gamers won’t buy this, and serious games won’t buy laptops.
It’s all about different tools for the job.

In that case might as well get a laptop for work and a console for gaming

 

[Ramchi]

RISC vs CICS and dedicated GPU will always be different, of course energy consumption will be higher if gaming needs are to be taken care, besides huge size batteries will make the laptop very huge and power hungry