Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8cx compute platform at the Snapdragon Technology Summit earlier today, boasting the biggest performance leap ever in the platform's history. While detailing the improvements in its Adreno 680 GPU, the company revealed that Gameloft's Asphalt 9: Legends would be coming to the ARM64 platform on Windows.
Asphalt 9 is a popular racing game on mobile devices, and the follow-up to Asphalt 8: Airborne, which we featured as one of our favorite Windows Phone games a few years ago. The title features over 50 cars based on real-life models, more than 70 tracks, and there are more than 800 events in the single-player mode on top of multiplayer capabilities. If its predecessor is anything to go by, the number of cars and tracks available is only bound to increase over time.
From a technical standpoint, Asphalt 9 is also impressive for a mobile game. Gameloft describes the title as featuring "HDR techniques and stunning visual and particle effects", which is probably why Qualcomm chose it to highlight the graphics capabilities of its Snapdragon 8cx chipset.
To clarify, the game is already available on the Microsoft Store, but as of right now, it's designed for x86 devices, which means that, if you try to play it on computers with ARM processors, you'll have to use the emulation layer and sacrifice performance. Today's announcement means that the title will run natively on ARM64, so you can enjoy the full performance of 8cx compute platform.
It's not yet clear when the game will actually be available natively for ARM64 devices, but hopefully, it happens sooner rather than later.
