Two owners of Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops say Qualcomm’s newest Adreno graphics driver, version 32.0.181.0, has made their machines much slower. One measured local AI models on the GPU losing between 69% and 87% of their speed, and the other says a video export that took under two minutes now takes about ten.
Both are single-user posts, not independent tests, and Qualcomm has not answered either of them. If you rely on GPU rendering or local AI tools, staying on your current driver until a fix appears is the cautious choice.
From release to complaints in two days
Qualcomm began pushing 32.0.181.0 through the Snapdragon Control Panel around 30 October, for first-generation Snapdragon X and for X2 laptops. On X2 machines it replaces 32.0.172.2. The changelog, as VideoCardz read it, lists fixes for games such as Forza Horizon 6, GTA V Legacy and Marvel Rivals plus the Luminar Neo editor, and carries no performance figures. By 1 November two threads on the r/snapdragon forum were blaming the update for the opposite effect.
Premiere Pro: roughly six times longer
The first is from a user named FullTimePedestrian, who warns Premiere Pro users off the update. Their ASUS Zenbook A16 now takes about 10 minutes to render a 7-minute 1080p project, against 1 minute 40 seconds before. No proof was attached, and the poster adds that editing software often breaks after a driver release, so weigh this one lightly.
Local AI: a before-and-after test on a Surface
The second thread, from NonVeganLasVegan, is more detailed. Using a Surface Laptop (8th Edition) with the Adreno X2-85 GPU, they compared both drivers by generating text with llama.cpp’s OpenCL build. Results in tokens per second:
| Model | Driver 32.0.172.2 | Driver 32.0.181.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-0.6B | 98.1 | 12.8 |
| Qwen3-4B | 29.5 | 9.0 |
| Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct | 26.8 | 5.9 |
Nothing else changed between runs, the poster says, and the laptop stayed on mains power. Switching the driver back and forth made the slowdown vanish and return each time, which points at the driver, though it is still one machine.
The damage seems confined to one path. The same models on the CPU shifted by only 1% to 4%, and NPU results barely changed. The smallest model, run on the GPU through WebGPU instead, stayed near 90 tokens per second under either driver. Feeding a prompt to the GPU was unaffected on the small models but 73% slower on the 30B one. Because llama.cpp reaches Adreno through OpenCL on Windows, the poster suspects Qualcomm’s OpenCL stack. That is a suspicion, not a diagnosis.
What is confirmed and what to do
What is established: the driver number, its release date and what Qualcomm says it changed. What is user-reported: every slowdown figure above, from two laptops (a Zenbook A16 and a Surface Laptop 8th Edition). The llama.cpp tester says the problem has also been raised on the Qualcomm Developers Discord server, but no corrected driver has been announced.
To see which version you have, open Device Manager, expand Display adapters, right-click the Qualcomm Adreno entry and choose Properties, then the Driver tab. If it reads 32.0.181.0 and your work hits the GPU through OpenCL or Premiere Pro, the same tab offers Roll Back Driver, which works only if Windows kept the previous one. Otherwise reinstalling the laptop maker’s own driver is the fallback. Qualcomm has itself cautioned that its generic drivers can cause compatibility problems on some devices and that going back to the maker’s driver is an option.
