Snapdragon X2 Elite Driver Update Slows Local AI by Up to 87%

Qualcomm’s latest Adreno GPU driver for Windows, version 32.0.181.0, is slowing down Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops instead of speeding them up, according to two separate user reports posted on Reddit’s r/snapdragon this week. One owner measured local AI text generation running 69 to 87 percent slower, while another says a Premiere Pro export now takes about six times longer.

Qualcomm has not commented on the reports, and there is no fixed driver yet. Until there is, owners who rely on GPU rendering or local AI may want to stay on the previous version.

Snapdragon X2 Elite Driver Cuts Local AI Speed

The more detailed report comes from a Surface Laptop 8th Edition owner running the Snapdragon X2 Elite with Adreno X2-85 graphics. After moving from driver 32.0.172.2 to 32.0.181.0, text generation in llama.cpp’s OpenCL backend dropped sharply:

• Qwen3-0.6B: from 98.1 to 12.8 tokens per second
• Qwen3-4B: from 29.5 to 9.0 tokens per second
• Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct: from 26.8 to 5.9 tokens per second

The user says the laptop, software, models and Windows version stayed the same, and the machine was plugged in. Rolling back the driver restored the old speed, and updating again brought the slowdown back, which points at the driver itself.

The problem looks limited to one path. CPU generation changed by only 1 to 4 percent, and the NPU, which uses a separate driver, stayed within a few percent. Running Qwen3-0.6B on the same GPU through WebGPU in Foundry Local held at about 90 tokens per second on both drivers. Prompt processing on the GPU was unchanged for the small models but fell 73 percent on the 30B model. Since llama.cpp uses OpenCL on Adreno under Windows, the user believes the regression is specific to Qualcomm’s OpenCL stack.

Premiere Pro Renders Take Six Times Longer

The second report comes from an ASUS Zenbook A16 owner who edits video on the go. A 7-minute 1080p project that used to export in 1 minute 40 seconds now takes around 10 minutes, the user says, though no benchmark data was shared.

This is not the first time an Adreno update has hit creative apps on these chips. In early September, r/snapdragon users said a previous X2 driver crashed Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and llama.cpp the moment they initialized OpenCL.

What Snapdragon X2 Elite Owners Should Do

The local AI slowdown has been reported on the Qualcomm Developers Discord, so a hotfix is possible. For now, users who depend on OpenCL workloads can stay on 32.0.172.2 or roll back through Device Manager. The episode is a setback for a platform where Qualcomm has otherwise been widening software support, including official Linux support for Snapdragon X chips.

The reports matter because local AI is a key selling point for Arm laptops such as the latest Surface models with Snapdragon chips. On the PC GPU side, users are pushing the other way, with tools like the NV UEFI Unlocker squeezing more AI speed out of older NVIDIA cards.