In this post, I'm going to take a look at five games using the in-game benchmarks on the MSI Claw here, both plugged in and unplugged in performance mode, to get some idea of what kind of performance we're looking at here in launch week. I've only had the device for about five days, and a lot of people are still getting theirs. Performance certainly has been very hit or miss in games.
There's a lot about this device that I really, really like, and I hope MSI shows the support and love to really fix it up because some games are running quite well and I'm enjoying them. But certain games, like Cyberpunk, being honestly one of the worst ones I've tested yet, so it is kind of like the worst-case scenario in games that'll break like Helldivers where if you unplug them, the power profiles never truly kick back in properly and give the GPU what it needs, and all that, and it gets stuck in low performance.
I can change some settings and get it to kick back in, but these are things I've been trying to work around and get through as I try to test games and be as accurate as possible here. Some obviously run really easily, especially easier to run games like Sonic and stuff like that, but there is some work to do here.
Anyways, I got benchmarks here from these five games plugged in and unplugged for you to check out. If you see some difference in color, when it comes to the unplugged stuff and plugged in, it's because of the way my capture card's working. It doesn't affect performance, but the plugged-in mode was kind of like a faded-out color. Something I have to work through with my capture card. Same thing happened on the Steam Deck OLED at launch, and I eventually got it fixed up too.
I'm finding ways to fix some of them as I go or work around some of the bugs and breaks that keep happening when it comes to the power management or the profiles and where it thinks I'm not gaming, and just kind of kicks out of giving power to the GPU and stuff like that. There's just a lot of little hiccups and bugs.
I expected performance from this thing to be in between a Steam Deck and a Z1 Extreme, and I think a lot of games, especially harder to run games, will fall in that category. But they have a lot of work to do to really smooth out the performance and at least get it consistent and get some of these games running better. A lot of other games are running fine, especially easy to run stuff, but there's definitely some issues and outliers there and things to work on when it comes to the MSI Claw.
I just hope that MSI comes after this thing the way that Lenovo did with the Go, Asus with the Ally, Valve with the Steam Deck. When you're going to release a device like this, you've got to be ready to hit it hard at launch and start fixing all the problems, optimizing, coming up with updates, and all that. So, I hope to see that from MSI because there's a lot here I do like about the MSI Claw, but a lot of the inconsistencies with game performance and the power profiles and just odd things happening do need to be straightened out, of course.