Qualcomm’s driver release process needs work too. Their drivers are available on GitHub, and different devices get different driver packages. The drivers don’t come with automated installers, so users have to extract CAB files and use a manual driver installation process. Even in the Windows 95 days, hardware manufacturers shipped driver installer executables that carried out this process under the hood. We carried out this process to try getting onto the newer June 10th driver, but after the update, Cyberpunk 2077, Civilization 5, Disco Elysium, and Bad Rats all failed to launch. Therefore, all testing here was carried out on the May 17, 2024 driver.

But Adreno X1’s cache bandwidth is low and latency is mediocre. Register file capacity isn’t high enough considering Adreno’s very wide wave sizes. GMEM flexibility is great, but Adreno still feels like a GPU optimized for the DirectX 11 era where pixel shader work dominates. On the compute side, performance with 64-bit integers is poor, and FP64 support is absent. Drivers and supporting software are in rough shape.

Qualcomm may still use that naming scheme internally, since their drivers refer to the GPU as the Adreno 741. Adreno 741 suggests the Snapdragon X Elite’s iGPU is a scaled out version of the Adreno 730 previously tested in the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 cell phone chip.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Dell CEO Michael Dell more or less confirmed that Team Green will enter the AI-PC hype next year.