Review Predator Atlas 8: Is Arc G3 Extreme a Game-Changer for PC Handhelds?

Acer's $1300/£1300 Predator Atlas 8 is here, one of a handful of new PC handhelds to launch this year despite crippling price rises to components like RAM and SSDs. The special sauce here is Intel's first handheld-specific chipset, the Arc G3 Extreme. Does the new hardware move the needle compared to existing AMD Z2 Extreme handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally X20? And how does Acer's handheld compare to better-known rivals like Valve, Asus and MSI in terms of design?

Before we get into the performance testing, it's worth quickly running through the design of Atlas 8. It's a chunky, handsome device in a pleasant dark grey chassis, and I like the colours chosen for the face buttons. However, it does feel a step behind rivals like the Xbox Ally X when it comes ergonomics, with quite geometrically basic grips and a robust 810g weight - significantly heavier than a 640g Steam Deck or 540g Switch 2.

The sticks and triggers use modern TMR sensors, which is great for longevity and precision, but the circular d-pad leaves a little to be desired and the buzzy, off-putting vibration makes it feel like you're holding a horrendous metallic wasp - some distance away from the more detailed and restrained Microsoft-derived Xbox Ally devices when it comes to vibration.

The eight-inch 1920x1200 120Hz VRR screen is thankfully a lot more competitive. It's no OLED when it comes to contrast and colour reproduction, but it gets bright enough for outdoor use, provides wide viewing angles and doesn't exhibit any distracting ghosting or other artefacts, so fast motion looks good. Overall, it's a better offering than the Switch 2's LCD, but a step behind the Steam Deck OLED - and with the powerful Arc G3 Extreme chipset on board, the handheld has the genuine capability of reaching high frame-rate territory for a change. The prominent speakers flanking the bottom of the screen are also amongst the loudest I've ever heard on a handheld, and I spent most of my time with the volume at around 10 percent as a result.

When it comes to performance, Intel's Arc G3 Extreme is a massive step beyond the AMD Z2 Extreme chipset that powers the Xbox Ally X.

The Atlas 8 was able to outperform the Xbox Ally X by around 50 to 70 percent at matched settings at a rated TDP of 35W, albeit with the Xbox Ally X using FSR 4 - which carries a small performance penalty, often around 5 percent. Generally speaking, this brought average sub-60fps games on the Xbox Ally X into the 80s and 90s, allowing extra headroom for increasing settings or simply a more responsive experience that takes better advantage of the 120Hz display.

The Atlas 8 offers four options - a 25W quiet mode, 30W balanced mode and 35W turbo mode, while a manual setting allows you to bump up the total to 40W - though its jargon-filled warning ("Changing PL1/PL2 may cause system instability") needs rewriting in plain English.

I only had the Atlas 8 for around four days of testing, so I focused my attention on five games with built-in benchmarks at 35W on both machines: Civilization 7 (CPU and GPU), F1 25: 2026 Season Edition, Forza Horizon 6, Returnal and Red Dead Redemption 2. The full results, including game settings, are shown below.

While the Atlas 8 performs incredibly well, even the brief testing experience I had was held back by a litany of bugs and poor design decisions in Windows 11. Despite improvements to the Xbox launcher and better usability for gamepad controls, the initial setup experience is torturously long and asks many irrelevant questions for a gaming handheld; driver and software updates are spread amongst nearly half a dozen different places; and at several points applications crashed or simply stopped working, necessitating a restart. I'm hesitant to blame Acer for any of these problems, as I experienced many similar issues on the Xbox Ally X, which has been on the market for considerably longer.

To take just one example, I wanted to install GPU driver updates before testing. New drivers weren't available via Windows Update, nor were they offered in the Intel Arc Control app. I eventually used Edge to visit the Intel Driver and Support Assistant page, which required a separate download and install. Once this was finished, the page had a generic error message, which I needed to fix by clicking on the lock icon next to the URL in Edge, setting the "apps on device" setting to enabled, and reloading the page. This was frustrating enough as a long-time user of Windows and Windows handhelds, so I can't imagine what it would be like for a relative newcomer. On SteamOS, by contrast, this would have been sorted with a simple trip to the Settings menu to install the latest updates.

Other issues I experienced in just a few days with the device included some Steam games missing from the Xbox launcher, Windows Firewall messages still popping up in the year of our lord 2026, the handheld's lights and fans remaining on while the screen and buttons stop working, games missing from the alt-tab and Xbox switcher menus while running, Explorer not responding to touch inputs, and taking nearly two hours to reset Windows 11 back to stock after testing while I waited, already long overdue in bed.

As Rich says in the X20 review: "This didn't feel like any kind of console experience - because too much of standard Windows intrudes and in that sense, it still feels off-putting."

It's much the same on the Atlas 8, and that's a shame. Perhaps the likes of SteamOS, Bazzite and other handheld-focused Linux distributions could give these handhelds a better user experience, but expect driver compatibility to be an issue at least in the short to medium term. For now, the expectation is that these are Windows 11 devices, and that means accepting some level of usability compromises versus Steam Deck or Switch 2.

Despite the rough edges that persist in Windows, the $1300/£1300 Atlas 8 is still a great handheld that is well worth considering. The surfeit of performance available here brings a new generation of games into handheld playability, even if Intel's XeSS has fallen a little behind the latest generations of DLSS and FSR. The design work here is also solid, with some ergonomic improvements and weight saving to find in later iterations, but fundamentally there's nothing here that prevents the Atlas 8 from becoming your primary gaming device on the go.

The new Acer handheld is about to be released in the US - Best Buy shows a November 2nd release date - and I'm fascinated to read more reviews from critics and users alike once the handheld is available for a wider audience. For example, I'd be interested to see more in-depth testing of performance and battery life when gaming in quiet mode. As always, individual reviews are necessarily limited in scope, so I encourage you to read widely to get a balanced view.

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