When Microsoft talked up the potential for gaming on Arm earlier this year, I was hopeful that its new Qualcomm-powered Copilot Plus PCs could be a turning point. There were promises from Qualcomm that games should “just work” on its Snapdragon X Elite laptops, and Microsoft demonstrated a variety of games running on its new Arm-powered Surface hardware.

It felt like the dream of a thin, lightweight laptop with great battery life, performance, and the ability to run some PC games might finally be coming true. After owning a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for nearly two months, I can confidently say that Windows on Arm simply isn’t ready for gaming.

In my Surface Laptop 7 review, I noted early on that I couldn’t get Shadow of the Tomb Raider to stop crashing until I put it into full-screen exclusive mode and lowered the settings. I ran into plenty of problems getting other games to even launch. Fall Guys shows an unsupported error, as does Halo Infinite.