When MSI shipped the original Claw in early 2024, it was the first serious attempt at an Intel-powered Windows gaming handheld designed to compete directly with the Asus ROG Ally, and it went... rather poorly, to say the least. Compared against the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, Intel's chip lost on practically every level. The MSI Claw was torn to shreds by reviewers, and for a debut, it was honestly about as bad as a launch can go.

Two years on, Intel is showing off a chip that goes the other way. The Arc G3 Extreme, the top of Intel's first processor family designed specifically for handheld gaming PCs, sits inside the Acer Predator Atlas 8, and Intel's own numbers put it ahead of AMD's current flagship handheld chip, the Ryzen Z2 Extreme. I got to hold the Atlas 8 at this year's Computex; it's a nice piece of hardware, but the gap between what Intel brings to the table now compared to back then is only half explained by the silicon inside.

There are some caveats, though none too damning. The first is the worst: most performance figures come from strict testing environments or from Intel itself, so it's hard to ascertain how good this chip is. As well, nobody actually knows the price. With that said, AMD's lead was never just about chips either, it's about ecosystem. Intel has still managed an impressive turnaround, though, and a big part of it comes down to the thing that took Intel longest to fix: the drivers.

The original MSI Claw lost to the ROG Ally in nearly every game

Meteor Lake was the wrong silicon for a handheld

The Claw arrived at CES in January 2024 to plenty of fanfare, positioned as a premium Windows handheld and the device that would put Intel in a category AMD had quietly taken over. It ran on Meteor Lake, the Core Ultra 7 155H, the same kind of laptop chip Intel had been shipping in thin-and-light notebooks. On paper, it had a capable integrated GPU and was the chip for Intel to enter the gaming handheld space with.

Unfortunately, in a handheld where the whole device can be running at 15W or less, the GPU's efficiency fell off a cliff. AMD's handheld parts were tuned to hold their performance as the power budget shrank, and Intel's weren't, so the lower you set the TDP, the wider the gap got. At the bottom of the range, the year-old ROG Ally could be close to twice as fast. That was a hardware problem, and it's what people remember most about the Claw.

It wasn't the whole problem, though. Even where the Claw had the thermal headroom to compete, the experience around the games was rough, with stutters, crashes, and settings that didn't behave. Some of that was MSI's software, but a lot of it traced back to Intel's graphics drivers which, at that point, still carried a rather poor reputation.

In the end, the result was a handheld that cost quite a bit of money and actually lost to its cheaper competitor that had been on sale for the better part of a year. Intel hadn't built the right chip for a handheld, and the drivers weren't mature enough to paper over it either. Both of those had to change.

Intel spent years rebuilding its Arc drivers

It was much needed

When Intel launched its first Arc desktop GPUs, the Alchemist cards, in late 2022, the hardware was fine but the drivers were not. Older games built on DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 ran badly or didn't run at all, performance swung wildly from one title to the next, and crashes were common enough that reviewers warned people off. Arc earned a reputation in those first months that Intel has been trying to shed ever since.

To its credit, Intel actually did the work. Across 2023 it pushed driver update after driver update, and by the end of that year a lot of the worst Alchemist problems were gone. Jump forward to 2025 and Intel was shipping new drivers frequently, averaging at least a driver update per month. Plus, day-one support was a priority for new releases, and many games just worked right away.

The drivers have got a lot better, with catastrophic crashes mostly eradicated and the suite of separate apps for managing your Intel GPU were unified. The built-in performance overlay is still unreliable, some sync features still cause crashes, and XeSS support has improved substantially, but it still doesn't feel as universal a safety net as FSR on handheld PCs, especially when you move beyond hand-picked modern titles. Still, Arc is usable these days, and it's only getting better.

Upscaling is what matters most out of all of those when it comes to gaming handhelds, and Intel is pretty disadvantaged compared to AMD's FSR that can be found almost everywhere. An Intel handheld can't lean on XeSS nearly as often yet, so it has to push more of its frames the hard way. Intel's work in this area has been showing, at least, as MSI's updated Claw 8 AI+ which arrived in the beginning of 2025 demonstrated massive gains over its predecessor. Utilizing Intel's Lunar Lake platform, it beat the ROG Ally X on both performance and efficiency, which makes sense given it was built around efficiency in a way that Meteor Lake never was.

After launch, Intel kept shipping driver and software updates for the Claw 8 AI+, and over time, performance got better and better. If you bought your handheld sometime in the summer, it was meaningfully faster than the one reviewers tested a few months prior. Not only that, it ended up the most powerful mainstream Windows handheld you could buy at the time, held back mainly by price and the usual Windows-on-a-handheld awkwardness. On a class of device that Intel had been humiliated on a mere year prior, the company had suddenly become a true competitor.

The Arc G3 Extreme is the first chip Intel built for handhelds

Low power, good performance

When it came to Intel-powered gaming handhelds, up until this point, every device ran on a chip that Intel had initially designed for laptops before it was squeezed into a handheld. The Arc G3 and G3 Extreme are the first ones Intel built for the form factor from the start. They're based on the Panther Lake architecture on Intel's new 18A process, and the Extreme pairs a 14-core CPU with the Arc B390 integrated GPU and its 12 Xe3 cores, running in a power envelope as low as 8W and as high as 35W. They also bring XeSS 3, the latest version of Intel's upscaler and a core part of the pitch, even if getting developers to actually support it remains an uphill battle.

Intel is making its biggest claims about the Xe3 graphics inside the chip. It's the largest integrated GPU the company has ever built, and Intel says it's 50 percent faster than the Xe2 in last year's Lunar Lake, with 40 percent better performance per watt. The efficiency gain is the one that matters for a handheld, because low-wattage performance is exactly where the original Claw fell apart. Intel even lists day-one driver support as a named platform feature now, and reading between the lines, that's also a tacit admission that the company knows this hasn't always been the case.

I spent a small bit of time with the Acer Predator Atlas 8, which is an 8-inch handheld with a 120Hz 1920x1200 display, 24GB of LPDDR5X, up to a 1TB SSD, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and an 80Wh battery in the Extreme model. While I could only briefly test it at Computex, my takeaways are positive. Acer's demonstration primarily focused on the newly-released Forza Horizon 6 running at native 1920x1200 resolution. It was hitting 60 FPS more or less consistently at medium graphics settings, which is pretty impressive. With that said, this is a single, unusually well-optimized game, picked by Acer, on pre-launch hardware.

Intel still hasn't broken AMD's grip on handhelds

We're still months away from a release

A faster chip doesn't win the category on its own. AMD's advantage in handhelds was never only about the computational prowess of its chips. Valve built SteamOS around AMD silicon that's less powerful than the Z1 Extreme, yet the Steam Deck is arguably what made the whole category mainstream. As well, FSR is supported just about everywhere while XeSS still isn't. Most of the popular handhelds, from the Steam Deck to the ROG and Xbox Ally line to the Legion Go, run on Ryzen, and momentum like that won't be reversed off of one good Intel chip.

Most numbers here come from controlled environments and Intel itself, so there's very little that's been independently verifiable in terms of pure numbers. With that said, everything is indicative of the Arc G3 Extreme being a genuinely powerful chip, and one that could truly challenge AMD on a level playing field. The Atlas 8 doesn't ship until October, and Acer hasn't said what it will cost. Until we can independently test the device and pricing is confirmed, the redemption story remains incomplete.

Getting this far is more than anyone expected, though. Two years ago Intel made a chip which went into a gaming handheld that, compared to the incumbent AMD processor at the time, was outclassed on several levels. Now, though, it's making one AMD has to actually worry about, and it got there by fixing the software, not just the silicon.