The MSI Claw is the latest embarrassing example of why Intel still isn’t ready to compete in the gaming industry

[Redaktion]

Performance benchmarks are starting to trickle in for the MSI Claw and it's not good news, but how well does it stack up against AMD based handhelds and can Intel really compete in the GPU market?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-MSI-Claw-is-the-latest-embarrassing-example-of-why-Intel-still-isn-t-ready-to-compete-in-the-gaming-industry.816261.0.html

[capnkimo]

I don't give a crap about Intel, but why write "embarrassing" in the title? that's desperate clickbait tactics

[Neenyah]

"Intel still isn't ready to compete in the gaming industry"

You mean in mobile iGPU gaming industry, right? Because guess what, Intel is with desktops dominating precisely the gaming industry for two decades now. Even Intel laptops despite lower benchmark scores than some AMD laptops are still better suited for games with better 0.1% and 1% lows, better frametimes and higher fps on average. Counter Strike 2 is an exception for example, a rare exception, where the game performs much better with all top of the line AMD CPUs than even with the 14900KS.

[Hotz]

The Problem with Intels iGPU is, that it needs more base power to unfold itself (as seen on the NBC review with the Lenovo Yoga Pro with 55+ watts and some older youtube tests with 65 watts). It's clearly not usable for low power gaming at all. And thus clearly not usable for gaming handhelds.

I'm not even sure that driver updates can fix this. Maybe it's an architectural thing that it justs needs more base power.

[George]

LOL!!!

This website sure has its FAVORITES for both good and bad press reports.

It ought to be a shock to nobody that a Team Blue based handheld gaming device performs poorly and even more so that this site seems to take great pleasure in highlighting the failure. :)

While I'd guess that MSI was paid dearly for producing the device I'd also guess that eventually one of two things will happen:

- Team Blue does finally come up with a competitive product
- Team Blue gives up and sells off the unit (like they always do when they fail)

Consider that back in the 90's early 00's they owned Marvell. (at the time a big ARM chip supplier)

[Hotz]

videocardz.com/newz/msi-claw-with-core-ultra-5-135h-matches-155h-version-in-gaming


When the lower end version beats the higher end version... Yet another proof what a mess Meteor Lake is. Probably caused by too many CPU cores, pointless cores, and pulling too much power away from the iGPU. Unbelievable how this went through quality assurance. And unbelievable how all these Intel "experts","technicians","scientists" approved this thing.

Add to this another issue which has been observed: the CPU threaddirector is getting confused by e-cores, p-cores, hyperthreading and as a consequence doesn't assign tasks in an ideal way. This then results in varying performance every time you start up a program. It's baffling...

And all these issues don't only apply to the MSI Claw, but also to all Meteor Lake Mini PCs and laptops.


At this point I wouldn't recommend anyone to buy a Meteor Lake system. Honestly not possible to recommend with a good conscience. Probably better to go with AMD if you need a new system right now, or if you can wait maybe wait for Arrow Lake (which allegedly fixes some of the issues). But that current Meteor Lake really feels like a buggy Beta.

[Hotz]

Also the fact, that the performance is mostly only on par with the Ally Z1 Base, which only has 4 CUs with only 256 shaders, while Meteor Lake has 1028 shaders...

It makes one think if the Meteor Lake iGPU does any significant work at all, or if the majority of the work is still done by the CPU cores only?

If the latter were the case, then it probably wouldn't matter much how many Xe-Cores the iGPU really has. Maybe 4 Xe-Cores, 8 Xe-Cores, 12 Xe-Cores would all perform similarly... though not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing, or if this reasoning is even correct.