It looks as though Acer could be about to enter the burgeoning gaming handheld market, after it posted a teaser photo on the X (formerly Twitter) account of its Predator gaming brand. The company is gearing up to unveil some new PC gaming hardware tomorrow, and it looks as though there’s an outline of a new Steam Deck competitor in the picture.
Acer has started to spread out in the PC gaming industry lately, not only by producing Predator-branded gaming monitors and laptops, but even by producing graphics cards. The race to make the best handheld gaming PC is getting a bit crowded now, though, with several companies, including Asus, Lenovo, and Zotac already looking to take on the Steam Deck. Now Acer could also be joining the charge, potentially unveiling a new handheld at the IFA show in Berlin.
The speculation all comes from a post on the Predator Gaming account on X (formerly Twitter). Acer invites readers to mark their calendars for September 4, 2024, when it’s going to make some new “gaming gear announcements” at the IFA show. It’s accompanied by a teaser video, which outlines a pair of characters, and then focuses on the silhouette of a laptop with another device sticking out from it, and it’s the latter that’s got people talking.
Acer has deliberately highlighted this device behind the laptop, and it looks like it could be one half of a gaming handheld device, showing a part of the screen and the outline of a controller section on the side. We could be wrong, of course. It might just be an excitingly shaped power supply for the laptop, but it definitely doesn’t look like a mouse or an ordinary PC controller. Is this a hint at a new Acer Predator gaming handheld? If so, what’s likely to be in it?
We’d hazard a guess that it’s going to be based on the new Intel Lunar Lake chip that’s also being launched at IFA. The company’s graphics cards, such as the Acer Predator BiFrost Intel Arc A770 are based on Intel GPUs, and Acer clearly has a close relationship with the firm. The MSI Claw 8 AI+ (?) is also expected to be based on Intel Lunar Lake, following on from its Intel-based Claw handheld.
If that’s true, then this potential new Acer Predator gaming handheld could be much more powerful than the Steam Deck. As we noted after the Intel Lunar Lake reveal, this new chip’s Battlemage GPU is potentially much quicker than the aging AMD RDNA 2 GPU in the Steam Deck, and its new CPU cores also use the same architecture as Intel’s forthcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPUs. Lunar Lake benchmarks also show the chip hitting a score of 4,151 in 3DMark Time Spy using its 30W mode, compared to just 1,617 from the Steam Deck’s Van Gogh silicon.
We’ll hopefully know for sure what Acer is announcing on September 4, 2024. You can also check out all the latest IFA 2024 news from our hub, as we’re on the show floor right now.
