Microsoft’s new Copilot+ PCs, touted for their blazing-fast performance for AI tasks, long battery life, and ease of use, seem to have missed one crucial area: video games. According to a report from Wall Street JournalPC gamers should avoid this range at all costs. Is the perfect time to switch to Mac?
Microsoft has completely failed
These PC Copilot+ are equipped with chips Qualcomm Snapdragon based on architecture Armwhich integrate a CPU, GPU, and neural processing unit. A design that is not unlike that of Apple chips, far from the aging Intel processors. However, the use of Arm chips brings the same limitations as those encountered by Apple Macs, including the inability to run popular PC games designed for the x86 architecture (Intel). About 15% of laptop users are gamers and, above all, Microsoft users are not used to dealing with such incompatibilities.
To work around this limitation, Microsoft has designed Prisman equivalent of Rosetta on Apple Macs. This tool allows x86 applications to run on Arm-based Windows machines with an emulation system, but the results are far from those achieved by Apple. In a test of 1,300 PC games, only half of them could be launched without bugs, graphical problems or startup failures.
In some cases, anti-cheat software, such as that used in Fortnite And League of Legendscannot be adapted to run on Arm, preventing these titles from running. There is no quick fix for this problem, as developers must provide a native version. At Apple, native games are starting to arrive, with top-notch performance, such as Resident Evil Village, Death Stranding and Stray.
A problem already known
This is very bad news for Microsoft, although PC critics Copilot+ had already reported problems with Prism from June. In addition to problems with professional software such as Premiere Pro Or Blender which were practically unusable, the games Destiny 2, Starfield, Halo Infinite And Fall Guys could not even be launched.
Microsoft has acknowledged to the Wall Street Journal that titles with high graphical requirements may not run on PCs Copilot+. For hardcore gamers, the American firm still advises to move on to other computers. Apple obviously has a nice move to play in the coming months, especially with its next range of upcoming M4 Macs.