The MSI Claw shall be one of many first handheld gaming PCs to characteristic an Intel Core Extremely processor, and the second to characteristic a variable refresh fee (VRR) display. Beforehand, the Asus ROG Ally was the one handheld system to characteristic dynamic gaming smoothing, which was considered one of its largest strengths, and after a lot back-and-forth, MSI has now triple-confirmed that the Claw will embody a 7-inch, 1080p, 48-120Hz VRR display.
Earlier at present I posted Will not I checked with the corporate on Friday to fact-check with the corporate, and was instructed that in case you’d quite go beneath the total 120Hz on supply, you may must manually set it to succeed in a 48Hz or 60Hz replace fee.
Nonetheless, MSI nonetheless insists the display is VRR, and I preliminary Satisfied the gross sales rep exaggerated – as a result of VRR is no It is the identical as manually setting the refresh fee, and since VRR is not a Microsoft characteristic that depends on sport assist, the corporate tells me it’s and it’s.
VRR is a standard type of expertise comparable to Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync, which permits the display’s refresh fee to dynamically match the body fee offered by the system’s GPU. This implies you will not expertise uneven gameplay or display tearing as a result of the graphics do not hit 60 fps, as a result of the display can routinely show 59 fps or 50 fps or 48 fps completely.
I defined this and gave MSI over 12 hours to reply however acquired no response.
However now MSI advertising professional Anne Lee tells me that the product supervisor has clearly confirmed that it’s a 48-120Hz VRR display, and I confirmed on the telephone that this implies dynamically adjusting its refresh fee, similar to the Asus ROG Ally. MSI additionally offered screenshots of the variable replace fee setting turned on in Home windows, which appears to be what MSI is referring to when calling VRR a Microsoft characteristic.
Lee agreed that elements of our dialog had merely been misplaced in translation, and we had agreed to name one another subsequent time. I am deeply sorry for the fallacious steering I gave you.
You’ll be able to normally nonetheless manually set the display replace fee with out VRR. For instance, the Steam Deck permits you to set any handbook refresh fee to nearly any quantity your monitor helps, whereas the Lenovo Legion Go permits you to select between 60Hz and 144Hz. However to keep away from instability and tearing, your system should nonetheless ship the right variety of frames always (which can require a body limiter and a few tweaking).
The Asus ROG Ally’s VRR display is useful, particularly when your video games run between 48 and 60 fps (which is inside its VRR vary). In my expertise, video games operating at 48 fps on the Ally look smoother than video games operating at 59 fps on the Lenovo Legion Go. Now, the identical appears to be true for MSI Claw.
The MSI Claw does not have a launch date but, however rumors recommend it may very well be out there as quickly as February or March.
Correction, 11:58 p.m. ET: The MSI Claw will include a variable replace fee display. In an earlier model of this story, I wrote no. We remorse this error.