MSI Claw 8 AI+ Review: Plush And Premium Handheld Gaming

UL 3DMark Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks

First, let's check out 3DMark to see if Intel is still punching above its weight in these synthetic graphics and gaming tests. We'll run Night Raid and Wild Life Extreme because those benchmarks are suitable for integrated graphics and cross-platform for easy comparisons.


Night Raid is a lightweight test meant for integrated graphics like those you would find on a PC from six or seven years ago. Naturally, the potent Xe2 GPU inside Lunar Lake absolutely demolishes this benchmark, although the Claw 8 AI+ actually puts up a slightly lower result in this test than some of our other Lunar Lake systems. Is this a grim portent of things to come? (Spoiler: no.) It's still outperforming the ROG Ally, even if only just so.


Meanwhile, in the Wild Life Extreme test, which is basically a memory bandwidth benchmark due to its extremely high native 4K resolution, the Claw 8 AI+ takes on all comers and is bested only by its sibling with a higher power limit and a couple of machines with extravagant memory bandwidth on tap. This is a great result for the handheld. What about some real games, though?

F1 2022 Formula One Racing Simulation Benchmarks

Now, granted that racing simulator F1 2022 is getting a bit long in the tooth, but it can be surprisingly sensitive to certain system configurations, so we enjoy using it as a test as it can really tease out some peculiar performance characteristics. It helps that we have lots of performance data for it too. We tested the game on its High graphics preset at 1080p resolution with upscaling disabled.


Another good result for the Claw 8 AI+. Despite being a much smaller chip with superior battery life, the Core Ultra 7 258V competes well against AMD's mainstream Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in this test, and decisively beats the ASUS ROG Ally and its previous-generation Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC. Of course, the Ryzen AI MAX+ is up there doing its own thing, but that's an entirely different class of product, really, despite still using integrated graphics.

Gears Tactics Unreal Engine Strategy Benchmarks

Similarly, 2020's Gears Tactics still makes an excellent benchmark for integrated graphics. It's a tightly-optimized Unreal Engine title with a highly-configurable built-in benchmark that provides a wealth of performance data after each run. We tested it on High, Medium, and Low presets at 1920×1080 resolution, just as we have done for the other systems.


Just like in F1 2022, the Claw 8 AI+ is running right alongside the Dell XPS 13 equipped with an identical Core Ultra 7 258V processor. We do see marginally better performance out of the Claw, that could be down to better cooling, or it could simply be due to the months of Windows and driver updates that have come out since we tested the Dell. Note that the Claw is actually more-or-less matching the RTX 2060 Max-Q on Medium settings. Crazy stuff.

Direct Benchmark Comparisons Against ROG Ally And Steam Deck

As we noted before, this is in a sense, a clash of titans. AMD versus Intel, and to a lesser degree, MSI and ASUS have enjoyed a similar rivalry for decades. We wanted to directly test these handhelds against each other, and we threw in some results from Valve's Steam Deck for context, and to help illustrate how much of a performance uplift these premium handhelds are versus Valve's older machine.

In a sense, these comparisons might seem unfair. After all, the ROG Ally X is also an older machine, with a last-gen SoC and slower memory compared to the brand-new Claw 8 AI+. We found that the performance is often closer than you might expect, though not always. We tested six games across the three handhelds, and would have liked to have tested more, but we were a little strapped for time with the Steam Deck. Here are our results:


In Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, which is based on the same game engine that powers Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, the ROG Ally X takes first place by a nose. However, playing Armored Core on that system is considerably smoother than on the Claw 8 AI+. We're going to chalk this one up to some needed Intel driver optimizations. It's still quite enjoyable on the Claw 8, though the Steam Deck arguably gives a better experience with its very consistent performance. Armored Core 6 is a 30 FPS game for the last-gen consoles, after all.


We picked Cyberpunk 2077 both because it's a great benchmark and because it has a built-in preset for the Steam Deck. However, we swapped each system from the default FSR 2.1 upscaling to Intel's XeSS, because it presents a much cleaner result, even on the AMD-based handhelds. Now, one thing to keep in mind here is that the Claw 8 AI+ is actually putting out considerably better image quality than the other two thanks to using the more advanced XMX path for XeSS. However, all three look pretty good and run well. Hopefully CD Projekt Red patches in XeSS 2 FG performance for this game, which could make it really smooth on the Claw.


In F1 24, the Claw and the Ally X are once again neck and neck. These settings aren't really playable on the Steam Deck despite running in the handheld's native resolution and even using upscaling. That's probably down to memory limitation, where the other two systems, with 24GB and 32GB respectively, coast right along. This game does support XeSS FG, so you could really turn up the performance in this title if you wanted.


Rockstar just launched the Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced Edition for PC, complete with numerous additional technical features for PC gamers. We used the High RT preset that doesn't enable the gorgeous real-time global illumination, but you probably could get away with it on the Claw 8, which runs circles around the Ally in this title on these settings. The Steam Deck puts up a remarkably playable performance on these settings considering its weak RDNA 2 ray-tracing capabilities, but the Claw is the clear winner here.


In adorable indie action platformer Onirism, the Claw takes home another win...sort of. Actually, in this game the Claw seems to have an issue where vsync does not actually disable as it is supposed to. As a result, you end up with some significant frame pacing issues any time the frame rate drops below 60 FPS, which it does frequently in larger scenes like the game's opening Chroma Falls area. Onirism is perfectly playable on the Claw, but the ROG Ally X seems to handle this title a little better despite the lower peak performance.


Finally, we wanted to test a challenging emulation workload on the Claw 8 AI+. Red Dead Redemption remains one of the absolute most challenging PS3 games to emulate using the RPCS3 Emulator, and that shows in the performance results here. The Zen 4 CPU cores in the Ryzen Z1 Extreme have AVX-512 instruction support, and that's probably contributing to the slight edge that the Ally has over the Claw here—although neither one is really particularly playable. However, PS3 titles vary dramatically in their requirements, and many more-lightweight PS3 games are perfectly smooth on both systems. Even the Steam Deck can handle a lot of simpler PS3 games, but not this one.

MSI Claw 8 AI+ Subjective Gaming Impressions

Gaming on the MSI Claw 8 AI+ is a delight. If you haven't used a PC gaming handheld before, a lot of what I'm about to say may not resonate with you. If you do have experience with one of these devices, explaining how the Claw feels is pretty simple -- it's fast. The potent Lion Cove P-cores chomp through gaming workloads with aplomb, and while performance can be a little inconsistent sometimes due to Intel's Arc drivers simply having less time for polish compared to the competition, it's overall very compatible and very good.


In our testing, we didn't find any games that were particularly problematic or incompatible. In fact, the issue we mentioned above with Onirism (where vsync seemed stuck on) was the worst problem we encountered in our game testing. Even obscure indie titles like Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore (above) were generally flawless on the Claw.


This machine, thanks in large part to its huge 32GB of RAM, has the capability to run just about any game you want. We got Forspoken running with fairly playable performance on this system—something that really isn't possible on the original ROG Ally and the Steam Deck. Whether you'd actually want to play Forspoken (at all, much less on the Claw) might be another issue altogether, but the point is that it works.


During our play over the last month, the controls felt responsive and well-built. The buttons aren't sticky or mushy at all, with a satisfying break as they hit the actuation point, and the sticks are both tight and fluid, not gritty or sloppy—thanks at least in part to the use of Hall-effect sensors that make use of magnetic fields to measure the stick position instead of mechanical parts.


Like with other handhelds, you have to be willing to accept compromises. You're stuck with a single 128-bit memory bus that has to be shared with the CPU cores, meaning memory bandwidth is at an extreme premium. Cranking resolution down to sub-native is a near death sentence for image quality on a desktop PC monitor or TV, but on a little 8" screen like this it's way less noticeable than you probably expect. That image of Nicoletta Goldstein up there probably looks pretty blurry on your monitor, but it's just fine on the Claw.

As long as you're willing to accept the compromises that come along with any handheld gaming machine—and as long as you're comfortable with the larger form factor of this system, as we discussed on the first page—the Claw 8 is a fantastic portable gaming powerhouse. We even played a few titles using a keyboard and mouse with the system docked, and it made us long for an overclockable Lunar Lake mini-PC.

Let's wrap this review up with a discussion of noise, thermals, and battery life, and then we'll give our final thoughts on the Claw 8 AI+.