Windows on Arm and Copilot Plus could be big for PC gaming

A big part of Microsoft Build that stood out to me last week was the potential of Windows on Arm for PC gaming, especially for laptops and handhelds. Microsoft and Qualcomm aren’t talking much about this yet, but both companies have been dropping hints about game compatibility.

Qualcomm said previously that most Windows games should “just work” on Snapdragon X Elite laptops, and Microsoft took the time to demo some more games onstage at Build last week. Borderlands 3 was shown running around 60 percent faster than native 1440p resolution thanks to Microsoft’s Auto Super Resolution technology. This taps into the NPU to boost frame rates and resolution, much like how Nvidia’s DLSS utilizes its own GPUs to upscale games.

Microsoft also revealed a new “works on Windows on Arm” website that catalogs which games work on Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite laptops. Linaro built the website and claims to have tested more than 1,400 games on the new Surface Laptop and other Snapdragon X Elite devices. More than 700 games are listed as running at 1080p and 60fps, including titles like Control Ultimate Edition.

This all sounds rather promising for emulated games running on thin and lightweight laptops, even if titles like Fortnite and Roblox won’t work due to their anti-cheat systems. There are still a lot of compatibility issues to work through, but if there’s an eventual transition to Windows on Arm in the PC gaming space, then it could solve many of the headaches I have with my gaming laptops on a weekly basis.

I’m constantly trying to ensure that apps aren’t hitting my GPU or CPU so I get the best performance while gaming, and sometimes there are background processes in Windows that can dip your frame rates or cause stuttering. During a session at Build last week, Steven Bathiche, head of Microsoft’s applied sciences group, showed more than 40 AI models running at the same time on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop without even touching the GPU.

The demo had Image Creator generating images in the Windows Photos app, the Phi Silica language model answering queries, and Windows Studio Effects doing background blur, denoising, and background segmentation behind the scenes. All the while, the new Recall AI feature was cataloging everything that was going on. “While I’m running this entire workload I can run a game,” said Bathiche, while showing the Task Manager with no GPU usage and the CPU regularly hovering below 20 percent utilization.

We’re about to see new Copilot Plus PCs with powerful NPUs from AMD and Intel, that will likely be coupled with gaming-focused discrete GPUs. So even without the Windows on Arm transition, I’m hopeful that we’ll steadily see background tasks in Windows shift to the NPU and free up crucial CPU and GPU resources for things like gaming.

I do wonder if all this NPU and Windows on Arm work will also be promising enough for future Arm-based handheld gaming PCs. Most of the popular devices like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally run on AMD’s Ryzen APUs right now, but the battery life is often underwhelming. The Snapdragon X Elite might not be the perfect chip for handheld gaming PCs just yet unless the performance per watt really is better than everything else, but a recent Dell leak revealed that a next-generation Qualcomm chip could be arriving in the middle of 2025. Dell CEO Michael Dell also dropped a pretty big hint that Nvidia could be about to enter the AI PC market next year during a Bloomberg interview last week. Nvidia and AMD are both rumored to be launching Arm PC chips as soon as 2025, and Nintendo is expected to debut its Nvidia-powered Switch 2 in early 2025. So there are a lot of rumors, leaks, and hints aligning to 2025 being a big year for new chips powering new devices.

Chief among the rumors is a persistent one about Microsoft developing an Xbox handheld. Could Microsoft’s big Windows on Arm push also lay the groundwork for an Arm-based gaming handheld? We already know the future of the Xbox looks a lot like a PC, so why not a miniature one with great battery life?

Maybe we’ll even see Arm-based Windows laptops with discrete GPUs soon because, at the very least, new Copilot Plus PCs with AMD and Intel chips inside will be more than capable of running the latest games while the NPU handles other tasks. Qualcomm isn’t discussing the potential for Snapdragon gaming laptops just yet, but there are so many possibilities here that it seems likely eventually.

The final Microsoft Build session that stood out to me was one with Mark Russinovich, CTO and technical fellow for Microsoft Azure. If you’ve been following Windows for a long time, you’ll know Russinovich was the co-founder of the Sysinternals tools that Microsoft acquired in 2006. These tools have been invaluable to IT admins for decades, and Russinovich has gone on to become an important architect of Microsoft’s cloud transformation.

Russinovich held a session at Build this year that delved into the headaches around AI security and the emerging threats that businesses will have to face as they develop AI systems. He covered the potential security risks of AI-based applications, including model extraction, data poisoning, jailbreaks, prompt injection, and emerging issues around plug-ins that are being developed for large language models. “There’s really no good way to lock down these plugins, you just have to trust them,” admitted Russinovich, a warning signal for any business looking to adopt AI plug-ins.

He also warned that jailbreaks, which let people work around AI prompt protections, are inherent fundamental flaws in these language models. “They’re not something that can be fixed easily, the mitigations today are primarily around minimizing their likelihood to do it,” Russinovich said.

Microsoft has also developed an open-source tool called PYRit to test against prompt injections and jailbreaks, and the company is also using red teaming to run attacks on AI systems to test systems and make sure they’re robust. Even with all of these protections, the key takeaway from Russinovich is to view LLMs as if they were junior employees.

“The best way to think about [LLMs] is that they’re a really smart, really eager junior employee,” Russinovich said. “You have to think about them as a potential loose cannon sitting in your system, and putting in the guard rails around that just the same way you would around a junior employee that you’re not going to let sign off on a $10 million purchase order. LLMs are not that senior person.”

The whole 45-minute session is well worth your time if you’re interested in AI security.

Next week, I’ll be digging into what’s next for Xbox, so stay tuned for that. As always, you can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com for any questions.

If you know anything about Project Latitude inside Xbox, or any secret project Microsoft is working on, you can reach me confidentially on Signal. I’m tomwarren.01 there.