You’ll find them in new devices like the Acer Predator Atlas 8.
Intel isn’t ready to give up on gaming handhelds just yet, despite the blow to the category from yesterday’s Steam Deck price increase. At Computex today, Intel unveiled its new Arc G-Series chips, a family of hardware built on its existing Core Ultra 3 lineup. The Arc G3 and G3 Extreme chips will feature up to Intel’s Arc B390 GPUs, giving them the real-time ray tracing and AI upscaling capabilities fro the company’s XeSS 3 technology. Intel says the chips will appear in devices in the coming months, including the Acer Predator Atlas 8, MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, and OneXPlayer.
The company hasn’t spilled many technical details on the Arc G-Series chips just yet, but broadly, they’ll feature two performance cores, eight efficiency cores and four low-power efficiency cores. Since these are essentially modified versions of Core Ultra 3 chips, they’ll also be built on Intel’s new 18A process. You can expect to see support for Wi-Fi 7 R2, Thunderbolt 4 and dual Bluetooth 6 connectivity.
As for features, Intel says the chips will be optimized for Windows 11’s full-screen Xbox mode. That means you should hopefully spend less time dealing with the standard Windows interface, which is notoriously clunky on handhelds. The company also says “select” games will launch faster using Intel Precompiled Shaders, which delivers optimized shaders from the cloud, instead of rendering them on your device. Supported games currently include Black Myth: Wukong, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and 7, as well as The Outer Worlds 2.
