News MSI teases its first handheld gaming PC — it's set to be announced at CES 2024

[Admin]

MSI is teasing its first handheld gaming PC, and we'll apparently hear more about it at CES.

MSI teases its first handheld gaming PC — it's set to be announced at CES 2024 : Read more

 

[watzupken]

Good to have some competition in the handheld segment. However, I am not optimistic with Intel’s Meteor Lake even though the iGPU is much faster than the XE iGPU. The performance consistency as demonstrated by their ARC GPUs is not that good, even though it’s improving. And it also depends how the APU scale with limited power.

 

[Forge64]

I am absolutely loving watching OEM after OEM step up and demonstrate publicly that they simply do not understand why the Steam Deck is continuing to define the market segment. It isn't performance, the Deck has exactly the right amount of performance for the other specs. Everyone else is busy cramming a higher res or larger screen in, and then shoveling performance parts in to either overcome the overhead of Windows or power some high res screen, and then they get all confused why their battery life has suddenly gone to hell.

"Powered by Intel" = we don't know why we can't compete with Deck and are changing arbitrary things to try to win.

"runs Windows 11" - You may not understand why your devices keep failing, but I do, and until you realize that Windows is a *problem* and not an *advantage*, you won't "win".

It's not even "Windows is always better" or "Linux is always better". It's not even "is always better for mobile gaming". When you're busy crushing a decent system down under 20W, *everything* matters. Valve has made a custom Linux distribution specifically aimed at hitting a ~20W system thermal envelope, and it's very good and getting better daily, and they've repeatedly said that they're open to anyone else partnering and using it, but all the OEMs still see "it runs Windows so Game Pass and no support costs" as their winning ticket. Meanwhile the Windows portables that are least bad are running a huge software layer *over* Windows to make controller and small screen viable, and that just makes the CPU/battery churn *worse*.

Get over yourself OEMs. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

 

[rluker5]

Good to have some competition in the handheld segment. However, I am not optimistic with Intel’s Meteor Lake even though the iGPU is much faster than the XE iGPU. The performance consistency as demonstrated by their ARC GPUs is not that good, even though it’s improving. And it also depends how the APU scale with limited power.

You may have noticed that Arc does relatively poorly in high fps scenarios and seems to scale much better with increasing resolution and load. Arc has a weakness with some driver or architectural overhead per frame. This gets less apparent the lower the framerate is. IGPUs inherently don't do a lot of fps so they hide this weakness. IGPU performance should be more consistent because of this. But there will still be a few games like Starfield hat just don't do well on Arc.

Also in the range of iGPU fps, Intel CPUs are highly tunable for efficiency even without any tuning software.
But the Arc Control software does have a one button efficiency tuning option - "endurance gaming":

View: https://youtu.be/unfxJvgpuc8?t=1485
,

View: https://youtu.be/w_V1A6esYWI
that would work for light gaming scenarios where people might care about power scaling.

I was interested in a handheld when they came out, but soon realized I would prefer a ~28w capable tablet instead. Or maybe a small laptop, like 12".