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PC gaming on Arm chips didn't happen in 2025, but an epic battle with x86 CPUs is coming
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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Many people want to stay on Windows though. The problem with ARM windows laptops was the garbage marketing, overpriced laptops, and bad compatibility layer. That's all been more or less fixed, so I think the next-gen ARM chips will be big.
Crazy that valve is able to fix this in a cave in the desert for free.
I don't believe any of this has been fixed, but we'll see what happens.
The compatibility layer has had significant improvements, most apps work fine now not to mention Valve's compatibility layer for ARM making games work. The Snapdragon laptops mostly flopped so you often see them on discount for $600 as opposed to the $1200+ they were introduced as. I think they have a good chance to be taken seriously.
I am not saying x86 apps don't work (well some don't work at all), but emulated apps usually have a bunch of strange bugs or issues like the provider refusing to honour commercial support when using the application on WoA. Here is one example:
I have other examples of applications that I use. For whatever reason, this piece often gets ignored when discussions about WoA come up.
And I am ignoring thing like line-of-business apps, regional commercial applications (local enterprise accounting software is not going support WoA) and consumer applications (less common than enterprise).
Not to mention issues like lower re-sale value, higher cost of repair and generally a pricier and much less developed support ecosystem. This is a big deal if you live in a developing country (or you have below median income in a place like the US).
The discount reflects the low level of demand.
The fact of the matter is that the current crop of X Elite devices are worse in every way relative to comparable x86 devices. This might change with Nvidia backed WoA devices, but I have a feeling they'll be more focused on selling ML enterprise GPU than being fully committed to fighting it out in the relatively low margin consumer sector.
I thought this was for Linux not WoA?