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00:00Hey guys, I'm Tom from Tech Chap, and this is the ASUS Vivobook S15, and it is one of the first
00:06laptops powered by a Snapdragon X series chip. This has the X Elite, technically the bottom-end
00:12X Elite, I think it's the 78-100. Not many people know that, actually, that there are
00:17four different Elite chips, and this is the lower-end one. But while I have already done,
00:22like, a first review of this, and go check out that video for, like, a full walkthrough,
00:26I want to talk about gaming. Can you actually play games, how well do they run,
00:30and should you consider buying a Snapdragon-powered laptop right now if you are going to play games
00:34on it? Well, I think I can sum up my experience in two words. Mixed bag. There's a few things you
00:41need to know, but first, have a look at my very pretty little table here, where you can see all
00:46the games I've tested, and I've color-coded them based on whether they are just completely
00:50unplayable, and then your, you know, okay-ish experiences, and then your good experiences.
00:55And it is a very colorful table, because we do have games in every category,
00:59and starting with the unplayable, and this is obviously just the games I've tested,
01:02there are thousands, tens of thousands of games, I haven't had time to test them all,
01:06but Call of Duty and Warzone simply don't run, whether that's in Battle.net or on Steam,
01:12F1-24 doesn't launch, nothing happens, Fortnite says it doesn't support ARM CPUs,
01:18and we have an issue with PUBG, because BattlEye won't install due to a driver error,
01:22so it can't boot the game. Now, considering the alternative to a Snapdragon series laptop is
01:27an AMD or an Intel laptop, and this is actually the Huawei MateBook X Pro with an
01:32Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which, I guess realistically, is kind of like the
01:37comparative chip to the lower-end X Elite processor, and while these do trade blows
01:43in a couple of games, and that's actually quite surprising, we'll talk about that in a second,
01:47obviously the big upside with going for an Intel or AMD chip is that you have so much better
01:52compatibility, with these Snapdragon X series, X Plus and X Elite chips being based on the ARM
01:58architecture, unless they're compiled and optimized to run on this hardware, they either won't run,
02:04or they won't run particularly well. Obviously, these are just launched, they're brand new laptops,
02:08and like we saw with Intel's ARC graphics, that took a fair bit of time for it to actually become
02:14quite good, and that was mainly down to driver support. I think once we start getting some good
02:18game-ready drivers for these Adreno GPUs, the integrated graphics on the Snapdragon chips,
02:24and until more developers do optimize for ARM, we are going to keep running into these issues.
02:28But then we have the borderline unplayable games. Tomb Raider, which I know no one actually plays,
02:33but it has a handy benchmark tool, and the frame rates aren't particularly exciting,
02:3627 FPS at 1080, 37 at 720, but when you launch it, it warns you of not having a display driver,
02:42DX12, and Vulkan crashes it, and there are quite significant lighting issues.
02:47Then we have Counter-Strike 2, which actually runs really well. I mean, it's not the most
02:51demanding game out there, but even at the laptop's native resolution of around 3K,
02:55I'm getting about 60 FPS. The only trouble is we're still getting the odd frame drop,
03:00and every, I don't know, couple of minutes, there's like a five second pause.
03:03Not ideal if you're playing competitively. I also couldn't drop the resolution while maintaining
03:08full screen mode with the game, because it would just go black on this laptop,
03:11and actually similarly in Overwatch 2, I was limited to these resolutions. I couldn't put it
03:16up to 1080p. Baldur's Gate 3 runs reasonably well. I mean, the frame rate's nothing to write
03:21home about, and I definitely recommend playing at 720p to get about 35 FPS with medium settings,
03:27although again, we do get quite a few frame drops, and it is certainly not a consistent frame rate.
03:31Dota ran incredibly smoothly. We're looking at triple digits at both resolutions, but again,
03:36we're getting big frame drops, which just means it's not a particularly enjoyable experience,
03:40even if we are getting relatively good frame rates. So those were some of the more troublesome
03:45games, but actually some ran really well. I was kind of surprised. Hitman, Minecraft,
03:50Rainbow Six Siege, all ran pretty well, with Rocket League pushing 150 FPS or thereabouts at
03:561080p and close to 200 at 720, and Minecraft hit triple digits at both resolutions.
04:05Okay, so we have a rough sense of what works, what kind of works, and what doesn't work,
04:09and I think if you are playing a particular game, you have a favorite, I would check if that is
04:14going to run and how well it will run before you buy a Snapdragon X series laptop. But there's a
04:18few other things to bear in mind. Firstly, unfortunately, compared to the ARK graphics
04:23that we get on the Intel chip, and that's the current Meteor Lake chip, obviously not the
04:27upcoming Lunar Lake chip, which will be coming out probably September, October time, which is
04:31supposed to come with 50% faster graphics, so we'll have to revisit that then. But in some games that
04:36are not well optimized for ARM yet, Intel ARK graphics, even AMD of course, although I haven't
04:42tested it for this video, just blows it out of the water in some games. Like Siege, we're getting a
04:46decent 48 FPS, 1080p, on the Snapdragon, but 127 on the Intel chip. And interestingly, it's this
04:53sort of two to three times optic, which I saw in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, because that is
04:59also not optimized for ARM. But once it is optimized, and we saw this with the 3DMark Wildlife
05:05Extreme test, in some cases the Snapdragon laptop can actually outperform it. So again, all coming
05:11down to optimization. The other thing to bear in mind though, and I have actually been quite
05:14impressed with, is the performance on battery. And I'm very happy to report that the Snapdragon
05:19laptop here, the Vivobook, performs almost just the same on battery as it does plugged in for gaming.
05:2641 FPS on Hitman plugged in versus 40 on battery, within the margin of error really. Again, to be
05:32fair, Intel's chips with Meteor Lake have also got a lot better, and there's only sort of maybe
05:37five to ten percent drop in performance going on battery. Not bad at all. The only thing I noticed
05:41was in a multi-core benchmark, it was about 15-16-ish percent slower. Multi-core processor
05:47performance. But in terms of graphics and gaming, it's pretty much just as fast away from the charger.
05:52Oh, and if you do happen to go with a Vivobook or with one of these laptops that have different
05:57performance modes that you can play around with, the difference between standard and full performance
06:01mode with this, which actually didn't make much difference to the temperatures or the fan noise,
06:06added about five to ten percent performance. And particularly with this, as some games still don't
06:11run very well, getting every extra frame you can does make a difference. And I must admit, I have
06:16also been impressed by how cool and quiet this has been throughout. Whether I've been gaming on
06:20battery or plugged in, only a couple of times did the fan war up to a point I'd be like, oh, the fan's
06:26going. Generally, it's been really cool and quiet. Very, very nice. Much better than a lot of other
06:31laptops I've used recently and much closer to my MacBook Air. So where does that leave us? Well, as I
06:37say, this is the lowest spec of the X Elite chips, 3.8 teraflops of GPU performance with the Adreno
06:44GPU, and actually the higher-end models get 4.6 teraflops, so quite a big boost in graphics. Also,
06:50this is brand, brand new. I've had this for just under a week now, and so over the coming months,
06:55I'm confident we will see some updates improving the gaming situation. Although you can't rely on
06:59that, of course. Nothing's guaranteed. So I think my conclusion would be, gaming on a Snapdragon
07:04laptop, yes, you can. Check if the game that you're playing runs well on this, but it is not by any
07:10stretch a smooth, seamless experience. A lot of games simply don't run. Even more don't run
07:16particularly well. It's early days, but I think the potential is there. So what do you reckon? Are
07:20you tempted to buy a new Snapdragon-powered laptop or perhaps hold off and wait a little bit, which
07:26is the sensible choice? Let me know what you make of this and also the gaming situation
07:30in the comments below. If you've got anything you'd like me to test, I'll do my best. Also,
07:33drop a comment. Give me a like and subscribe if you enjoyed the video,
07:35and I'll see you next time right here on The Tech Jam.