The MSI Claw will probably be one of many first transportable gaming PCs to pack an Intel Core Extremely processor – and the second to characteristic a variable refresh fee (VRR) display screen. Beforehand, the Asus ROG Ally was the one handheld with that dynamic gameplay-smoothing rendering characteristic, and it is one in every of its largest benefits, and – after a lot forwards and backwards – MSI has now triple confirmed that the Claw will probably be a 7-inch, 1080p, 48 -120Hz VRR display screen too.
I revealed that earlier in the present day shouldn’t have a VRR display screen, after explicitly checking with the corporate on Friday and being instructed that guide set up can be required to attain a 48Hz or 60Hz refresh fee should you choose to go decrease than the complete 120 supplied Hz.
Nevertheless, MSI continued to insist that the display screen was VRR, and I preliminary grew to become satisfied that representatives have been stretching the reality – as a result of that’s what VRR is not identical as manually setting the refresh fee, and since VRR isn’t a Microsoft characteristic that depends on sport help, which the corporate instructed me it was and it was.
VRR is the generic type of applied sciences like Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync, which permit a show’s refresh fee to dynamically match the body fee delivered by your system’s GPU. Which means you will not expertise uneven gameplay or display screen tearing simply because your graphics do not attain, say, 60 fps, as a result of the display screen can mechanically show 59 fps, 50 fps, or 48 fps simply tremendous.
I defined this and gave MSI over 12 hours to reply – and heard nothing again.
However now MSI advertising and marketing specialist Anne Lee now tells me that product managers have explicitly confirmed that it’s a 48-120Hz VRR show, and I confirmed over the cellphone that this implies the refresh fee needs to be adjusted dynamically and mechanically, like on the Asus ROG Ally. MSI additionally offered a screenshot of the variable refresh fee setting enabled in Home windows – which is outwardly what MSI was referring to when it known as VRR a Microsoft characteristic.
Lee agrees that a few of our dialog was misplaced in translation, and we agreed to name one another subsequent time. I apologize in my opinion in deceptive you.
You may typically manually set the refresh fee of screens with out VRR. The Steam Deck permits you to set arbitrary guide refresh charges for nearly any quantity the display screen helps, and the Lenovo Legion Go, for instance, permits you to select between 60Hz and 144Hz. However to keep away from stuttering and tearing, your system nonetheless must constantly ship the precise variety of frames (which can require body limiters and a little bit of tweaking).
The Asus ROG Ally’s VRR display screen is very helpful in case your sport runs between 48 and 60 fps, which is throughout the VRR vary. In my expertise, a sport with 48 fps on the Ally appears to be like smoother than a sport with 59 fps on the Lenovo Legion Go. Now it appears like the identical goes for the MSI Claw.
The MSI Claw would not have a confirmed launch date but, however rumors recommend it might arrive as early as February or March.
Correction, 11:58 PM ET: The MSI Claw has a display screen with a variable refresh fee. In an earlier model of this story I wrote that this is able to not be the case. We remorse the error.