With performance and especially efficiency that should frighten Intel, Windows PCs equipped with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Elite are strongly appealing to content creators. The current problem is a lack of apps, but Blackmagic Design just announced that its popular (and free) video editing and effects software DaVinci Resolve 19 (beta 3) now supports Windows machines running the new chip. .
“DaVinci Resolve 19 beta 3 now supports Qualcomm’s new all-in-one CPU, NPU and GPU for Windows, Snapdragon X Elite,” Blackmagic Design wrote in a press release. “DaVinci Resolve has been optimized to maximize the performance of the DaVinci Neural AI Engine, with NPU acceleration providing customers with up to 4.7x faster performance for AI tools such as Magic Mask and 2x performance times faster for intelligent cropping on computers using this new processor.
All DaVinci Resolve 19 tools found on Intel PCs and Macs are also on the Qualcomm platform. These include the ColorSlice color correction tool, Ultra NR denoising, Intellitrack AI for motion tracking and stabilization, audio ducking and much more. Since many of them are AI-powered, users should benefit from the Snapdragon X Elite’s Neural Engine (NPU) that beats almost all laptop processors.
The Snapdragon The VPU (video processing unit) offers AV1, VP9, HEVC (H.265), and H.264 (up to 10-bit) encoding and decoding, so users should be able to work with most native camera formats and encode for YouTube and other platforms quickly.
Graphics performance is a weak point, however, with performance comparable to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 and well below most dedicated GPUs. Meanwhile, the Apple M3 GPU (on a MacBook Air) beats it by a wide margin of 31%. This means that DaVinci Resolve effects, encoding, and more that rely on the GPU can be slow compared to Wintel and MacBook M3 machines.
Still, this is good news for content creators looking for a lightweight road machine that can compete with Apple’s laptops. DaVinci Resolve 19 public beta 3 for Windows on Arm with Snapdragon X Elite is now available for download from the Blackmagic Design website.