Ignore the Steam Deck price hike – Acer's new handheld blows it out of the water in every way
Albeit one of those ways will be price, too
It's almost a matter of inclination now as to whether you think the PC gaming handheld market is in a boom or bust phase. Devices can't stop seeming to sell out, but at the same time, they're almost all spiking in price thanks to the ongoing memory crisis, giving the industry a frankly terrible vibe from a consumer point of view.
Still, while some brands like Asus, MSI and Lenovo have been here for ages, Acer's had a more mixed time with the concept of a gaming handheld, announcing a few down the years but not really making one properly until now. The Predator Atlas 8 has made a splash at Computex 2026 by arriving in tangible form with Intel's latest handheld chip, the G3 Extreme, powering its mobile gaming.
I got to use the Atlas 8 for a good few minutes at an Acer event today in Taipei, and it left me feeling fairly confident that we're about to get another top-class option for PC gaming on the go, albeit one that will likely have an eye-watering price tag when it's eventually confirmed.
The Atlas 8 is a super familiar device, of course, with a design that simply can't be called drastically different to its competition on the market. It's a chunky handheld built around an eight-inch display, with grips on either side housing its console-like buttons, and some hefty venting on the top and back of the machine to aid air flow.
Around each analogue stick, there's some RGB lighting (again, not a unique touch), while the back of the machine hides some extra grip buttons and toggles to shorten the triggers' travel distance. In the hand, this is a comfortable enough console to hold, and it isn't as big as some others I've tried (like the Lenovo Legion Go 2). That said, I can't really comment yet on how it'll feel in the hand after an hour or more.
What I can comment on, though, is how the machine performs, and it's a really positive outlook for my first hands-on with Intel's new platform. With Panther Lake chips blowing my socks off in laptops all year, it's not a big surprise that the G3 is similarly impressive at first glance.
I played Forza Horizon 6 on the handheld, with its graphical settings mostly set to High, at 1900x1200 resolution (arguably sharper than needed on a screen this big), and the game was running at a very stable 55-60fps in most situations, with a few drops into the high 40s when I crashed through forests in more rural locations.
That might not sound like the most flawless performance outlook, but with plenty of headroom in the settings to tweak it, and the ever-present option of resolution drops, there's almost certainly a seriously brilliant portable version of this game to be had on the Predator Atlas 8. The unit didn't even have Intel XeSS activated, so I turned that on for some added sharpness.
More testing is needed here, obviously, and I can't really put my weight behind those benchmarks done on the fly, but goodness me, it looks like we've got another big competitor in the form of the G3 chipset. I can't wait to see how the non-Extreme version performs, too.
All of this happened while the handheld stayed nice and cool, so its fans are clearly doing good work (with Acer claiming they're the result of some smart new internal design touches). Plus, crucially, the display looks like a very solid pick. It's a 120Hz VRR panel, and while it's not OLED, I had no complaints about its colour or vividness at first viewing, in fairly harsh lighting.
That lofty resolution, meanwhile, means this could be one of the sharpest portable displays you'll find, and again gives plenty of options for tweaking resolution game-by-game. With the whole thing running Windows 11 in the background, and Xbox's new handheld UI as a skin over it, you'll get the slick and relatively reliable interface that graced the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, too, although that also will likely mean the same infrequent but annoying bugs and hitches.
With Acer saying that the Atlast 8 should be on its way later in the year, and October looking like a likely window, the big question is what it'll cost, and it's almost certainly going to cause an "oof" when confirmed. We're through the looking glass on handheld prices now, and in a world where the Steam Deck OLED now costs £649, brace yourself for the Predator Atlas 8 to outstrip that by hundreds of pounds (and indeed dollars).
Based on my first hands-on experience, though, it looks like Acer's done the work to ensure that its console still tempts players even at a steep price, and I'll be extremely keen to test it further once it gets closer to release.
