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

Microsoft's new Copilot+ PCs that offer super fast performance for AI tasks, all-day battery life, and other perks, struggle when it comes to gaming, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

microsoft copilot plus pc
The Copilot+ PCs are equipped with Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chips that merge the CPU, GPU, and a Neural Processing Unit. Using an Arm chip means Microsoft's PCs now face the some of the same problems as Apple's Macs, such as an inability to run popular PC games designed for x86 chip architecture. Approximately 15 percent of PC laptop users are gamers, and Microsoft users aren't accustomed to having to deal with incompatibilities.

To get around the Arm issue, Microsoft designed Prism, which is basically the equivalent of Rosetta 2 on Apple Macs. It makes it so x86 apps can run on Arm-based Windows machines, but it turns out it's not working well. In a test of 1,300 PC games, only half of them ran without bugs, glitches, or launch issues.

In some cases, anti-cheating software in games like Fortnite and League of Legends can't be translated to run on Arm, preventing even games without significant graphics requirements from running. There is no quick fix for the problem.

Reviews of the Copilot+ PCs highlighted problems with Prism way back in June. The Verge, for example, said that Premiere Pro was "practically unusable" and that rendering projects in Blender was "terrible." Shadows of the Tomb Raider crashed continually, and other titles like Destiny 2, Starfield, Halo Infinite, and Fall Guys would not launch.

Microsoft told The Wall Street Journal that titles with demanding graphics requirements may not play on Copilot+ PCs, and that while it is aiming to make a "quality gaming experience" on the new devices, players who want a high-performance experience should choose an alternate PC.

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Top Rated Comments

DrJR Avatar
15 months ago
These are made for AI, they should use the tagline “Hardcore AI, we aren’t playing games…..”. Problem solved.
Score: 37 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Keymaster Avatar
15 months ago
People continually bitch about Apple, but then an article like this comes along and makes it clear that Apple can really do things right compared to how other tech companies throw things together. This stuff isn't easy, so a lot of companies just try to cobble together whatever they can stick buzzwords on to make sales. Apple still tries to make the best products it can, quality things that are high on usability...they don't always pull it off of course, but more often than not they do. The seamless conversion from Intel to Apple Silicon is just one more example of how Apple really can do great things.
Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Nermal Avatar
15 months ago

Nobody is buying a productivity notebook PC to run games, come on.
But they might buy one for productivity with the hope to run some games as well. It's a bit like how I didn't buy a Mac for gaming, but I still enjoy the odd game.
Score: 18 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Seoras Avatar
15 months ago
Maybe the game developers should be the ones to accomodate rather than the platforms.
My eldest son has a PS5 but has spent the last week trying to finish Zelda on my old Wii which is 16 years old now.
It's amazing to watch, so much thought and imagination in that game.
Nintendo really know how to write games without focusing too much on visual eye candy.
I'm sure Zelda would look amazing, compared to the Wii, on any ARM laptop.
Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)
JCCL Avatar
15 months ago
Well, laptops without a dedicated graphics cards have been crap at playing games. Why would anyone expect different from these, especially if emulated? If developers see potential, they’ll port to ARM.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ethanwa79 Avatar
15 months ago
I got one of these for my son for his freshman year of college. After 10 days of use he wanted to return it an got a standard x86 HP laptop instead, which can run his games and Blender just fine.

Microsoft is seeing the pain of switching to ARM first hand.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)