The MSI Claw shall be one of many first handheld gaming PCs with an Intel Core Extremely processor inside — and the second with a variable refresh fee (VRR) display screen. Beforehand, the Asus ROG Ally was the one handheld with that dynamic gameplay smoothing show function, and it’s certainly one of its largest benefits, and — after plenty of backwards and forwards — MSI has now triple-confirmed that the Claw will include a 7-inch, 1080p, 48-120Hz VRR display screen too.
Earlier in the present day, I printed that it wouldn’t have a VRR display screen, after explicitly fact-checking that with the corporate on Friday and being advised that it could require handbook setup to hit a 48Hz or 60Hz refresh fee should you’d reasonably go decrease than the complete 120Hz on provide.
Nevertheless, MSI continued to insist that the display screen was VRR, and I initially turned satisfied that reps had been stretching the reality — as a result of VRR is not the identical as setting refresh fee manually, and since VRR shouldn’t be a Microsoft function that will depend on sport assist, which the corporate advised me that it was and that it did.
VRR is the generic type of applied sciences like Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync, which let a display screen’s refresh fee dynamically match the body fee delivered by your system’s GPU. Which means you don’t expertise uneven gameplay or display screen tearing simply because your graphics don’t hit, say, 60fps, as a result of the display screen can mechanically show 59fps or 50fps or 48fps completely wonderful.
I defined this, and gave MSI over 12 hours to answer — and didn’t hear again.
However now MSI advertising and marketing specialist Anne Lee now tells me that product managers have explicitly confirmed it’s a 48-120Hz VRR display screen, and I confirmed over the cellphone that which means dynamically and mechanically adjusting its refresh fee, just like the Asus ROG Ally. MSI additionally supplied a screenshot of the Variable Refresh Charge setting turned on in Home windows — which, it seems, is what MSI was referring to when it known as VRR a Microsoft function.
Lee agrees that a part of our dialog simply obtained misplaced in translation, and we’ve made a pact to name one another on the cellphone subsequent time. I apologize personally in steering you unsuitable.
You may typically nonetheless manually set the refresh fee of screens with out VRR. The Steam Deck allows you to set arbitrary handbook refresh charges of most any quantity the show helps, and the Lenovo Legion Go allows you to decide between 60Hz and 144Hz, for instance. However to keep away from choppiness and tearing, your system nonetheless has to persistently ship the correct variety of frames (which might require body limiters and a little bit of tweaking).
The Asus ROG Ally’s VRR display screen is useful significantly when your sport is operating between 48 and 60fps, that are inside its VRR vary. A sport operating at 48fps on the Ally will look smoother than one operating at 59fps on the Lenovo Legion Go, in my expertise. Now, it feels like the identical shall be true of the MSI Claw.
The MSI Claw doesn’t have a confirmed launch date but, however rumors recommend it might arrive as quickly as February or March.
Correction, 11:58PM ET: The MSI Claw could have a variable refresh fee display screen. In an earlier model of this story, I wrote it wouldn’t. We remorse the error.