Epic Games Brings Support To Windows On Snapdragon With Easy Anti-Cheat

One by one, the barriers to gaming bliss on Snapdragon laptops are falling. Back in November, a new build of Windows brought support for Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions to the Prism emulator that is used to translate x86-64 program code into Armv8 instructions that the Snapdragon CPUs can execute. Now, Epic Games has announced that it is releasing a new version of the Epic Online Services SDK that adds Arm support.

That SDK includes Epic Online Services Anti-Cheat, which is more familiar to gamers as Easy Anti-Cheat, the plug-and-play anti-cheat solution used by most Unreal Engine games (i.e. Fortnite) and many others, including Elden Ring and Apex Legends. This release means that developers can now update their games to allow Easy Anti-Cheat to function through the Prism translation layer.

Naturally, Fortnite is the first game to get such an update. The popular multiplayer shooter should now be playable on Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus Windows laptops. As Epic points out, the implementation in Fortnite serves as a sort of test bed for implementation into other titles, so it's possible that Fortnite will be a little funky on Snapdragon systems for a bit. That's better than not launching at all, though.

The chart above lists games that we tested in our review of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge that did not work on the machine. You'll note that many of the items have been marked out; that's mostly because of the previously-mentioned Prism update. Fortnite should work now, too, but the same can't quite be said just yet for the other Easy Anti Cheat titles on the list. They will need game-specific updates from the game developer to add the latest Epic Online Services package with Arm support.

There's also the question of performance. In titles like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Halo Infinite, we expect the Snapdragon X Elite systems to handle the games well enough; we found many similar e-sports titles to run very well on Qualcomm's finest. That may not necessarily be the case for more demanding "core" games like Elden Ring Nightreign, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, or The First Descendant. Of course, there's only one way to find out!

In any case, kudos to Epic for working to improve the plight of gamers playing games using Windows on Arm devices. This move likely indicates growing popularity for Snapdragon-based laptops, which offer excellent native app performance—competitive with the best from Intel, AMD, and Apple—along with extremely long battery life. It will be fascinating to observe the competition between the four chipmakers as time goes on.