MSI hasintroduced two new system updatesto its Claw handheld gaming PC to alleviate previously reported issues surrounding gaming performance. MSI has published a new BIOS update — E1T41IMS.106 as well as a new GPU driver update — 31.0.101.5445 for the IntelMeteor Lake-powered handheld that combined boosts performance by up to 150% in certain titles.

MSI shared a performance comparison in 19 titles comparing the new updates to the  Claw’s outgoing driver and BIOS revisions. Game performance improved by up to 150%, though the average performance improvement is much closer to 30%.

MSI Claw gaming handheld

The games MSI chose to benchmark were7 Days to Die, Monster Hunter World, Cyberpunk 2077, Grand Theft Auto V, Hunt: Showdown, MIR 4, BeamNG.drive, Fortnite, Lethal Company, Dead Island 2, Diablo 4, F1 23, NBA 2K24, Hogwarts Legacy, Rainbow Six Siege, Helldiver 2, Palworld, Stray,andRed Dead Redemption 2.

By far7 Days to Diesaw the largest performance uplift, featuring a 150% performance jump.Monster Hunter World, Cyberpunk 2077,andGrand Theft Auto Vsaw a performance uplift between 64% and 40% respectively.Hunt: Showdown, MIR 4,andBeamNG.drivesaw a performance improvement of 35% to 28%.Fortnite, Lethal Company, Dead Island 2, Diablo 4,andF1 23all saw performance improvements of 16% to 13%. The final set of gamesNBA 2K24, Hogwarts Legacy, Rainbow Six Siege, Helldiver 2, Palworld, Stray,andRed Dead Redemption 2saw performance uplifts of under 10%.

MSI Claw

These improvements should help alleviate the Claw’s performance problems against competing rivals on competing silicon. A few months ago, anearly reviewof the Claw discovered that MSI’s handheld had noteworthy performance issues, making it much slower than theROG Ally, especially at lower power levels (TDPs) which is very important for preserving battery life. Not only did the Claw have worse performance according to that early review, power consumption was also worse compared to theAMD’s Z1 Extreme.

MSI’s new updates probably aren’t enough to make the Claw competitive with the Z1 Extreme on all fronts, but it is a step in the right direction. If we’ve learned anything from Intel in the last year, it’s that it is more than capable of rectifying GPU performance issues through itsdriver updates. The MSI Claw is also one of the first handheld gaming PCs ever to use IntelCore Ultraprocessors rather than AMD’s purpose-built Ryzen Z1 series APUs, so it’s very reasonable to see teething issues occur.

Aaron Klotz

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Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.