GoKawiilThis is not a review of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus, the first gaming handheld available with Intel’s new Arc G3 Extreme handheld gaming chip. Now that my colleague Sean Hollister is done reviewing the Steam Machine, I’ll let him go deep on the new Claw at some point in the future. This article, instead, is my first impressions of the new MSI Claw as someone who primarily plays games on a Steam Deck OLED. Sean called the Claw the “next-gen handheld,” and I wanted to find out: Would it be a worthwhile upgrade for Deck fans like me? Could it possibly be worth the eye-watering $1,799 price?
For me, the Claw has a high bar to clear. The $789 Steam Deck OLED is my favorite handheld — maybe my favorite gadget — since the original Nintendo Switch. It’s comfortable to hold, has a great-looking display, and has a good enough battery to survive pretty much any evening of gaming for me. It lets me play the vast majority of my Steam library wherever I want. But the Deck isn’t great for every game I own; top-of-the-line AAA games occasionally play poorly, with muddy graphics, bad frame rates, or both. I will suffer through those drawbacks for many games, but every once in a while, I turn to my PS5 for titles that don’t work well on the Deck.
Without me changing a single setting, the improvements were immediately clear: All three looked much nicer than they do on my Steam Deck. In FFVII, Cloud’s spiky blonde hair in had fewer blurry edges, and I could actually see definition in his face when he was turned around. In a tricky firefight on an airfield in First Light, I had a much easier time seeing where the enemies were shooting me from.
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade on a Steam Deck OLED. Click this link to see the full-size image. Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade on an MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus. Click this link to see the full-size image. Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Frame rates were much better, too. With FFVII, the Claw and the Deck both defaulted to 30fps, but after tweaking the frame rate settings, the game hovered between 70–100fps on the Claw, even during the boss fight against the Scorpion Sentinel, yet it struggled to consistently hit 60fps on the Deck. While wandering around First Light’s packed chess match at the fictional Grand Carpathian Hotel, I saw between 80–90fps — the Deck generally maintained about 35fps — and even when I cranked everything up to Ultra on the Claw, I was still getting around 60–70fps. 007 First Light’s default settings for both handhelds was 1280 x 800 at potato quality, however, so things don’t look markedly different on the Claw without some tweaking. But in motion the game looks and plays better.
007 First Light on a Steam Deck OLED. Click this link to see the full-size image. Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
007 First Light on an MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus. It looks better in motion. Click this link to see the full-size image. Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Expedition 33 wasn’t quite as much of an improvement. From moment one, it looks much sharper on the Claw than it does on the Deck, where it’s often a fuzzy mess. On the Claw, the default settings in Expedition 33 kept a frame rate of around 30–40fps in the game’s opening area, but toggling on Intel’s XeSS upscaler and frame generation toggles gave me more like 70–90fps worth of smoothness.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on a Steam Deck OLED. Click this link to see the full-size image. Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
... continue reading