This batarang houses Qualcomm’s next big bet on gaming
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Two years ago, we told you how Qualcomm was eying the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, building a reference design that eventually morphed into the Razer Edge. And while Razer’s handheld was eventually hamstrung by truly ridiculous pricing, Qualcomm is now building three new chips to replace the previous one.
Today, the company’s announcing the “Snapdragon G Series handheld gaming portfolio” with three distinct tiers: a Snapdragon G1 for game-streaming handhelds with over 10 hours of battery life on Wi-Fi, a Snapdragon G2 for “full-featured mobile and cloud gaming” with 5G, and the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 to start chasing PC gaming handhelds on performance.
Qualcomm says the G3x Gen 2 isn’t a glorified phone chip — it’s got twice the GPU performance of the Razer Edge’s first-gen chip thanks to a brand-new Adreno A32 GPU, plus over 30 percent faster CPU performance from its eight-core Qualcomm Kryo CPU. The chip’s peak performance is between 15 and 18 watts, far closer to the Steam Deck’s AMD Aerith system-on-chip than we’ve seen before, and Qualcomm claims it can sustain performance run after run after run.
Qualcomm’s chip may not quite have the performance of a Steam Deck yet, mind you — Qualcomm gaming director Mithun Chandrasekhar hedges when I ask. “I can theoretically crank the performance to 2GHz and beat the living shit out of other handheld devices, but then you’d get 30 minutes of battery life,” he says.
Some firms are already intrigued: Ayaneo, a company that specializes in boutique gaming portables, will be among the companies to build a
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