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The Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL are Microsoft smartphone that launched nearly a decade ago as two of the last smartphones to ship with the Windows Mobile operating system. They were discontinued two years later, but hackers have been finding ways to install alternate operating systems ever since, including Android and even full desktop versions of Windows 10/11.
Of course, desktop versions of Windows were never meant to run on the aging hardware: the Lumia 950 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor and the Lumia 950 XL has a Snapdragon 810 chip. But the folks at the Lumia WOA Project have been plugging away at their ports of Windows for these phones for years, and the latest Lumia 950 drivers are the first to add support for hardware-accelerated graphics when running x86 apps on these ARM-based smartphones.
Lumia Drivers BSP Version 2502.03 were released on February 1, 2025 and should work with a number of Windows 10 and Windows 11 builds – you can check out the GitHub project for compatibility notes.
In a nutshell, these drivers allow DirectX 11 compatible applications designed to run on computers with x86 chips to leverage the Lumia 950 series GPUs. For the Lumia 950, that’s a Qualcomm Adreno 418 GPU, while the Lumia 950 XL has an Adreno 430 GPU.
Up until now these phones only supported hardware-accelerated graphics when running apps that had been natively compiled for ARM32 or ARM64 architecture.
While these mobile GPUs were pretty decent when the phones launched in 2015, they’re not exactly state of the art in 2025, so don’t expect stellar performance for gaming or other graphics applications. But the update should still lead to improved graphics performance and could also theoretically help improve energy efficiency and battery life by offloading some tasks to the GPU that would have otherwise tied up CPU resources.
Keep in mind that the Lumia WOA project is still very much an unofficial implementation of Windows for Lumia phones that’s maintained by a team of volunteer developers. Some of the phones’ hardware is not supported and some of the features you might expect from a mobile device are not fully supported either (like cameras, phone calls, SMS or MMS messaging, or dual SIM support).
via ITHome and LumiaWOA Telegram Group