On the first day of Qualcomm’s tech summit, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was announced. It introduces a new naming scheme and offers significant advancements over last year’s Snapdragon 888 processor, especially in terms of gaming.
The new Adreno GPU boosts graphics rendering capabilities by 30% while simultaneously improving efficiency by 25%, and there are several Snapdragon Elite Gaming enhancements. With the unveiling of the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 gaming platform, Qualcomm is expanding its gaming drive even further.
Qualcomm makes chipsets for a wide range of devices, so a move into gaming was almost certainly inevitable. Snapdragon chips are most well-known for being used in smartphones, but they are also used in wearables, extended reality (XR) devices, PCs, and even automobiles. The Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 gaming platform aims to bring together all of Qualcomm’s Elite Gaming capabilities into a single device. It’s a gaming-only chipset, according to Qualcomm, and it’s supposed to be “the PC gaming rig of mobile games.” It features game-optimized GPU drivers, full 10-bit HDR gaming, support for external monitors up to 4K resolution at 144FPS, USB-C for future XR devices, and game streaming from the cloud, your PC, and your console. Qualcomm’s 5G mmWave Modem-RF technology is also supported.
Qualcomm has stated that, for the time being, it is solely focused on offering its chipset to Android devices, owing to the popularity of gaming on Android. As a result, it doesn’t appear to be an NVIDIA Tegra/Nintendo Switch competition – at least not yet. Even yet, this is the company’s first major foray into the gaming industry, and it has the potential to expand significantly in the future. It didn’t go into great detail about the new chipset’s capabilities, but considering that Qualcomm collaborated with Razer on a developer kit, it’s evident that Qualcomm knows where it wants to take this. We don’t know if the G3x is significantly quicker than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 just yet, but we’ll likely learn more in the near future.
Razer Developer Kit — powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon G3x Gen 1
Qualcomm announced the first developer kit based on the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 platform with the launch of the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1. The company collaborated with Razer to create an exclusive development kit that features the best hardware available in a mobile device. It combines the best of Snapdragon into a single powerful handheld device for developers, and it’s designed to be “ergonomically very comfortable” and suitable for “very lengthy gaming sessions.” It features active cooling, support for mapping screen presses to buttons and thumbsticks, and Qualcomm claims it will be the area where you can play “all your games.”
This developer kit will not be offered to consumers; instead, it will be sent to developers as a method for them to explore the capabilities of what Qualcomm views as the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1’s future. Qualcomm claims that it must first service the developer community in order to make them aware of what is possible, after which OEMs may construct hardware based on that concept and sell it to customers.
“Razer is ecstatic to be partnering with Qualcomm Technologies and supporting them on their journey to bring new cutting-edge technologies to the global gaming industry,” says Min-Liang Tan, co-founder and CEO of Razer. “Qualcomm Technologies and Razer will lead the way with fresh and innovative solutions that will push the frontiers of fidelity and quality accessible in portable gaming, altering how these games are played.”
A 6.65-inch 120Hz OLED panel with full HD+ resolution and 10-bit HDR capability is included in the Razer developer kit. There’s a built-in 5MP 1080p60 FPS webcam with two microphones that users may utilize to live stream games online, as well as four Snapdragon Sound-powered speakers. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 has the thermal and processing power to run games, capture them, combine them with a webcam and microphone, and stream them all at the same time.
The USB-C port can also be utilized to tether an XR viewer to the device, allowing it to function as a companion controller. Qualcomm didn’t reveal much about the gadget itself, but we expect to hear more about it once developers get their hands on it.
For the time being, we can only speculate about Qualcomm’s plans for the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1. We also don’t know how much more powerful it is — if it is at all — than the standard Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Qualcomm described this as a “next-level” gadget for mobile gamers, and given that Qualcomm also announced a collaboration with ESL (Electronic Sports League) with more to come next year, we may see similar devices at the forefront of mobile Esports in the future.
