The MSI Claw might 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. Beforehand, the Asus ROG Ally was the one handheld with that dynamic gameplay smoothing show characteristic, and it’s considered one of its greatest benefits, and — after quite a lot of backwards and forwards — MSI has now triple-confirmed that the Claw will include a 7-inch, 1080p, 48-120Hz VRR display too.
Earlier at this time, I printed that it wouldn’t have a VRR display, after explicitly fact-checking that with the corporate on Friday and being instructed that it will require handbook setup to hit a 48Hz or 60Hz refresh fee when you’d relatively go decrease than the complete 120Hz on supply.
Nevertheless, MSI continued to insist that the display was VRR, and I initially grew to become satisfied that reps have been stretching the reality — as a result of VRR is not the identical as setting refresh fee manually, and since VRR is just not a Microsoft characteristic that is dependent upon recreation assist, which the corporate instructed 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’s refresh fee dynamically match the body fee delivered by your system’s GPU. Which means you don’t expertise uneven gameplay or display tearing simply because your graphics don’t hit, say, 60fps, as a result of the display can routinely show 59fps or 50fps or 48fps completely effective.
I defined this, and gave MSI over 12 hours to answer — and didn’t hear again.
However now MSI advertising specialist Anne Lee now tells me that product managers have explicitly confirmed it’s a 48-120Hz VRR display, and I confirmed over the cellphone that meaning dynamically and routinely 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 characteristic.
Lee agrees that a part of our dialog simply received misplaced in translation, and we’ve made a pact to name one another on the cellphone subsequent time. I apologize individually in steering you flawed.
You possibly can usually 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 constantly ship the suitable variety of frames (which may require body limiters and a little bit of tweaking).
The Asus ROG Ally’s VRR display turns out to be useful notably when your recreation is operating between 48 and 60fps, that are inside its VRR vary. A recreation 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 might 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 may have a variable refresh fee display. In an earlier model of this story, I wrote it wouldn’t. We remorse the error.