Intel's new handheld gaming chip is a huge deal – and Acer's new PC gaming handheld shows exactly why
The market might be about to shift again
Computex this year promises perhaps more than the average share of interesting twists in the worlds of laptops and PCs, with gaming bubbling up as a major subplot. Intel's just announced a huge addition to the market, the Arc G3, which promises to add a whole new wrinkle to the gaming handheld world.
Every time I've used a laptop with Intel's new Panther Lake chips this year, but especially when testing those with the Arc B390 iGPU, it's been unbelievably striking to see how their gaming performance has blown previous expectations out of the water.
So, it makes perfect sense that Intel's been working on a handheld version of some of the same technologies, now announced after a few months of teasing, and it's not just a theoretical chip. Instead, we already have at least one flagship product confirmed from Acer: the Predator Atlas 8.
The handheld looks much like what you'd expect, with a chunky build and some serious venting, plus an eight-inch 120Hz VRR screen to ensure you get plenty of display real estate for gaming on the go.
The most interesting factor, though, is that it'll use the Arc G3 Extreme, the highest-end version of Intel's new chip, and should therefore offer fairly bleeding-edge performance. It'll also offer the Intel XeSS 3 sharpening system that I've seen work impressively when supported by developers.
As Intel puts it, the G3 Extreme basically has that same B390 GPU in its architecture, meaning we could see performance roughly on a par with the laptops I've tested. The standard G3, meanwhile, downgrades this to an Arc B370 – although in truth it's hard to predict how each will perform given the smaller display and design constraints.
Acer says the Predator Atlas 8 will ship sometime in October this year, so it's a fair few months off, and that leaves one huge unknown – what it'll cost. Given Valve just had to whack Steam Deck prices up by a huge margin, this could be a bit of a bitter pill, but there's no easy way to predict pricing for a new device like this.
I'm hoping to get some more inside information on the Intel Arc G3 during my time in Taipei for Computex next week, so if you're a PC gaming handheld fan you might want to keep your eyes on T3 for the next few days.
