With Microsoft’s new Surfaces leading a wave of Copilot Plus PCs powered by Arm chips that could reshape our expectations of Windows laptops, you might be wondering: do they game?
Technology
This Microsoft-approved website tracks how Windows games play on Arm
Microsoft and Qualcomm just revealed a new website, WorksOnWoA.com, with examples of how 1,481 Windows games run on Arm.
We’d already seen a few examples, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Control — but at Build, Microsoft and Qualcomm just revealed a new website with far more examples. WorksOnWoA.com has apparently already tested 1,481 games on the Surface Laptop and other devices with Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite chips, and it lets you search to see whether your game of choice falls into one of four categories: “Perfect,†“Playable,†“Runs,†or “Unplayable.â€
Here’s what each of those terms mean, according to Linaro, the Arm engineering group that built the website and counts Microsoft and Qualcomm among its supporters:
Perfect: Runs at 60+ FPS at 1080p resolution with no glitches / issues that affect gaming experience
Playable: Runs at 30+ FPS at 1080p resolution with minimal glitches/ issues that affect gaming experience
Runs: Runs with bugs that may affect gaming experience
Unplayable: Does not run due to anti-cheat or other failures
Unfortunately, the site doesn’t specify graphics settings — it’s quite possible they’re running at the lowest levels of detail. Some of them are also using Microsoft’s AI upscaling to reach that frame rate and resolution target, though the website keeps track of that, too.
In a Build session, Microsoft and Qualcomm showed us how Borderlands 3 runs about 60 percent faster with Auto Super Resolution versus native 1440p by tapping into the Qualcomm chip’s NPU, for example:
Image: Microsoft
Though Auto Super Res could maintain the same frame rate at a higher effective resolution instead:
Image: Microsoft
Image: Microsoft
Anyhow, 747 games are currently listed as running at a “perfect†1080p and 60fps, including Control Ultimate Edition, and it should be easy to check against Linaro’s findings when final devices come out.
Image: Linaro
Here’s the whole list of 19 “unplayable†games so far, like Fortnite, Roblox, and PUBG, many of which famously don’t run on the Steam Deck due to their anti-cheat measures:
Image: Linaro
Image: Linaro
Microsoft says that the BattlEye anti-cheat system does support Arm, though support wasn’t necessarily enough to get big games that use it onto the Steam Deck.
Image: Microsoft
As far as the accuracy of these tests, Linaro says:
The information is intended to serve as a guide, but does not absolutely guarantee that a game will run. The results have been tested, but may not work on your specific machine and configuration. If your results differ, please contribute to the site with your own findings.
If you want to submit your own results, Linaro is taking your contributions — in the form of commits and pull requests.