Emulation on the MSI Claw (is Actually Pretty Good)

[Music] hey everybody this is R from Metro gamecore I've been thoroughly testing the MSI claw over the past few days and I've come to the conclusion that I'm not ready to make a final review on this device a lot of that comes down to these software and Graphics drivers I think it just needs more time to get updated and mature before we can make a final assessment especially when it comes to PC gaming and battery life however there is one aspect that I think we can make a pretty good assessment about right now and that's going to be emulation so over the past couple days I've been just testing every system I could think of to see how they play on MSI claw and so that's what I want to showcase in this video we're going to go over some tips and tricks when it comes to Retro handheld gaming because there are some pretty interesting aspects there and then we'll cover all the way up to the more contemporary systems without any further delay let's go ahead and dive [Music] in okay but before we get started on the Showcase part I do want to touch a little bit more on why I'm not making a final review on the MSI Claw at least not right now and a lot of this comes down to the fact that I've already made one Impressions video when I first got my hands on the device about a week and a half ago and most of that covered things like the hardware so how the buttons feel how the screen looks things like that none of that has changed obviously but the software itself is the thing it's really been like the big question mark when it comes to making this review even from my initial Impressions I saw that something was up it was pulling way too much power and and not getting the performance I was expecting especially compared to other handhelds in the Market at around that same price point or even lower now after making that Impressions video MSI actually reached out and they wanted to have a sit down call so we did that about a week ago and we talked a little bit about my Impressions and some of my suggestions for some future updates and they also talked about how they are working hand inhand with Intel to try to update the graphics drivers and they're expecting something very soon now the company has a couple different ways of communicating with users including a subreddit and then also a forum dedicated to the MSI claw I've been watching those like a hawk and I just really haven't seen any big updates just yet and so if I did make a review video right now I don't think it would be very positive however the biggest point for me is that I don't think it would be very reflective of the MSI claw if and when it actually hits its stride once we get those software updates and so what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to point you to a couple in-depth reviews that are already out there that I think really cover the topic very well the first one is by the fox it's like 40 minutes long and he goes into great detail about why this chipset in particular is not performing well from a battery perspective but then also at a performance level in addition there are a couple videos from retro techdad that I think are really insightful one is just a review of the MSI claw itself but another is a comparison against the two different skews that we have for the claw and then a couple other handhelds that are out there on the market and so I'll leave a link to these videos in my description below and I think they are pretty insightful when it comes to how the MSI Claw is performing right here and now and honestly just based on their reviews and my own experience I would say that yeah this thing is not really worth the $800 that I paid for it at least right now I think it still has some promise and I'm interested to see what the performance is going to improve if software can actually make a tangible difference but all the same yeah I would caution to say watch those videos first make your own Impressions and then from there we can kind of move on now the thing about those review videos that they are mostly focused on PC gaming performance that's going to require a balance between CPU and GPU power supply when you think about something that's power starved like a handheld or a laptop something that's running on battery power all those little wattages make a lot of difference and the balance between CPU and GPU performance makes a huge difference when it comes to playing a PC game now the thing about the MSI Claw is it seems to be putting too much power into the CPU and not enough into the GPU as a result that means that things that are GPU Reliant are not performing well now the thing about emulation is that it's the opposite most of the time it's going to be more CPU Reliant that means that the way that the MSI Claw is set up right now may not be half bad for emulation and if they do make software updates in the future it may be that emulation performance gets a little bit of an upgrade but not as much as it's going to be when it comes to PC gaming and so among all the different things that we can make an assessment about with the MSI claw I think that emulation in particular is one of those that won't have a huge difference if and when they update their Graphics drivers and so as a result I do think this is going to be pretty close to what we'll be seeing even months from now anyway long story short yes I don't plan on making a final review of the MSI claw until we're close closer to a final representation of what the device is going to be like and you can kind of extrapolate your own decisions from there based on the fact that this device is already launched and it has all these issues now all the other handhelds also had some issues as well but among all the others I think this one is the one that needs the updates the most and with all that out of the way let's now jump into the emulation Showcase with the MSI claw because I do think there are some interesting points here okay let's start by talking about the settings and I am going to use the presets that are provided by MSI for the most part I kept everything at a 50% brightness but then also I used the super battery setting theoretically this one should use the least amount of power and give you the best battery life and for most systems this one worked fine there were a couple near the end where I had to boost it up to either performance mode or the balanced mode but I found when it came to emulation swapping between these three didn't make a huge difference and some of this is due to the fact that emulation is a different Beast than PC gaming as far as other settings I kept the screen at a 1080p resolution and a 60 HZ refresh rate except for when it came to Retro Gaming on retroarch in this case I wanted to take advantage of the 120 HZ refresh rate on this display and that's because that refresh rate is going to be double of most retro games which means we can use a tool called black frame insertion this is actually an option within the retroarc settings you find it under video and synchronization and what this will do is it'll play content at 60 HZ but in between every frame it's going to insert one black frame as well this means the games are still going to run at 60 frames per second but adding in that black frame is is going to make everything look a lot smoother in fact the whole experience resembles a CRT Monitor and it reduces motion blurring bya Bunch now the MSI Claw is not exclusive to this feature you can use it with any display that goes at 120 Herz or above so you can also do this on the Rog Ally as well as the Lova Legion go now as I'm filming this you're going to see a black bar just kind of roll up the screen really slowly and it's not visible to the human eye but it does get picked up by my phone which I use for this topown footage now switching over to my big fancy camera you can see that not getting that rolling black bar and this is still running with black frame insertion or BFI however one thing to note is that by adding that black frame it does reduce the overall brightness of the screen so for example here I'm actually running it at full brightness but as you can see the screen looks a little bit dim so this is definitely not something you'd want to do outdoors or in a brightly lit environment but if you're playing indoors it can be a really smooth and nice looking experience and I found that with the MSI claw I like to combine this with a scan line Shader just to make it look even more like a CR T now one thing to bear in mind with black frame insertion if you have any sort of slowdown or stuttering you're going to see like these black flashes on the screen because it's not hitting a full 120 frames so bear in mind you don't want to use this feature with anything that struggles to reach 60 frames per second for example here I'm running the swan station core at like an 8X resolution and it's not quite being able to keep up and so as a result we are getting some flickering here and there which can be quite annoying so what you want to do is either turn off black frame insertion or reduce the upscale resolution for example here with this PS1 game I reduced it down to a 5x resolution or 1080p and honestly because this is a 1080p display you don't really want to push it past that anyway but I did want to show that flickering as a result so for the Retro games that I'll be showing off for the next couple minutes I'm going to have black frame insertion turned on you can see it up in the labeling above where I say BFI and I got to say these retro games just look amazing with BFI and then an appropriate Shader for the handheld systems like Game Boy and Game Boy Advance I prefer to use an LCD Shader so I use the LCD 3x1 and Game Boy Advance in particular looks really good on this display mostly because it's a wider screen aspect ratio so everything's going to kind of fill out really nicely now when it comes to Home console systems I prefer to use a scan line Shader that way it replicates a CRT television and it's really hard to convey just how good this looks on the screen CRTs are just not something that can really show up well on a YouTube video either way it's still a really impressive experience from a retro gaming perspective now one of my minor complaints about the MSI claw when I made my first impressions video was that the d-pad felt a little bit mushy and I still stand by that I wish it had a more clicky response to it compared to something like the r Ally but I will say that in practice I didn't really mind it that much at all when playing d-pad Centric games like Nintendo and Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo honestly if you try one of the old gam pads from these systems they're kind of mushy on their own as well and so even though technically I would consider this to be not a great d-pad when it comes to the functional perspective I didn't really have any major complaints when testing out all these gains now I do think that there will be a divided consensus about this some people are not going to mind the d-pad like me but other people are probably going to hate it so I do want to just focus on the fact that the d-pad is not perfect but at least from my own perspective testing out hundreds of these things over the past few years I do find it to be manageable one other thing worth noting is that you'll see the charge rate which is going to be in red in the MSI afterburner settings that I have in the top left and here you can see that the average wattage that's being pulled when playing retro games is somewhere around 9 Maybe 10 watts and with a 54w hour battery that means we should get anywhere between 5 and 1/2 and 6 hours of battery life when playing these games now when you get to the harder to run systems it does get pretty terrible much like it does with PC games but we'll get to that later in the video as it stands right now I'm pretty happy with this battery life it's a lot better than I was expecting compared to something like PC gaming performance but of course you're not going to spend $800 on a handheld just to play retro games so let's start moving it up a bit with the harder toplay systems we'll start with Nintendo 6 before now this system in particular rarely ran at 60 frames per second and so as a result I didn't really like using black frame insertion and that's because of the wonky refresh rate with many of these games instead I just prefer to just play them straight so here I am playing these games at a 1080p upscaled resolution and I would say the average that I got here was about 11 Watts altogether and that's going to give us about 5 hours of battery life so not bad there either it's a similar story when playing PlayStation 1 again this is upscaled to a 1080p resolution and I also turned on some wies screen hacks this one's a little bit more power demanding I found the average to be somewhere around 13 maybe 14 watts altogether which means that worst case scenario you're going to get somewhere between like 3 and 1 half and 4 hours of battery life and I think one of the reasons why the power demand is a little bit higher on PS1 compared to Nintendo 64 is that with PS1 I was using black frame insertion and as a result I did have to increase the brightness on the screen just to make it more manageable so I do think there's a watt or two that being used by the fact that I'm having to turn up the brightness in order to get something that's a little bit brighter and then finally the last system that I tried with retroarch using black frame insertion was Sega Saturn for this I'm using the most accurate emulator the beetle Saturn core and the combination of black frame insertion and a scan light Shader with Sega Saturn is just really a joy to play it also had a little bit higher of a power demand around 15 watts altogether so again you're looking at 3 to four hours of battery life next up we have PSP using the Standalone emulator I'm running this at a 4X resolution or 1080p and one thing I noticed with this particular emulator is I would get some pretty significant stutters or stops at first I thought it had to do with the CPU itself but it turns out this was something with the SD card essentially if I tried to load a game from an SD card with the PSP emulator I would get these stops and stutters however if I moved it over to the internal storage it all went away now this is a pretty common thing I've seen it before with this particular PSP emulator but I did think it was noteworthy in case you were planning on playing PSP games from the SD card storage you're probably going to want to put them internally instead okay let's move up now to Gen 6 we're we're going to start with Nintendo GameCube for this I'm going to be running at a 3X resolution which is a little bit higher than 1080P and I found that all the games here worked just fine I was using direct X11 as the back end and the performance was excellent I would get a little bit of Shader compilation here and there but overall after a couple minutes of playing every single game played at full speed and for your standard GameCube game I would expect a 14 or 15 watt power draw but when you get into the high-end games things like FZ GX or Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2 you can see an upwards of maybe an 18 wat power requirement however even at 18 Watts that's still going to give you about 3 hours of battery life and I don't think that's too shabby and it's almost identical situation when it comes to Nintendo Wii emulation which makes sense because this is using the exact same emulator either way yes 3x resolution and the power demand usually stayed under 18 Watts so much like with Gamecube I would expect to be able to play at least 3 hours on any of these games now let's go back to Generation 6 and the PS2 next again I'm running this at a 3X resolution which is going to be a little bit higher than 1080P and here I found that I had excellent performance again but the power demands were a little bit higher for your standard games I would expect maybe 16 to 17 Watts but once you get up there with some of those harder to run games like Burnout Revenge or God of War II I did see that the power demand went all the way up to like 23 Watts altogether that's going to give you about 2 and 1 half hours of battery life on average which is still going to be pretty close to something like GameCube but not quite there either way from a performance standpoint absolutely no issues running PS2 other than the fact that the power demand was starting to get a little bit High finally let's do one more Gen 6 system we're going to do original Xbox this is using the latest version of the zmu emulator and I'm running everything at a 1x or native resolution even then I found that the power demand was a lot higher at least 25 watts but sometimes up to like 32 watts to get this running and even then all the games that I tested ran very poorly we're talking about half speed or even worse so at least for my initial testing it looks like the Xbox emulator does not play nicely with this Intel chip moving back let's go back to Nintendo systems and we'll talk a little bit about Nintendo 3DS a few weeks ago I made a video about the 3DS emulator Citra and the fact that it had been pulled down because of its association with the Yuzu development team and at the time I wasn't really sure whether or not I would be showing 3DS footage in the future just because of the fact that that emulator had been taken down however after thinking about it for a while and kind of talking with others I have decided to bring back Nintendo 3DS footage a lot of this had to do with the fact that the 3DS emulator spefic specifically was not part of the lawsuit associated with Yuzu it really just has to do with the fact that the team was working on both and they had some shared properties between the two so in that regard I think it's safe to show off 3DS emulation especially as a hardware test as we're doing here in this video either way I'm using the Citron nightly build and it's the last version that was up before it was taken down and so this is my own personal archive either way when it comes to Performance I was playing everything at a 4X resolution and performance here was pretty great I did get the typical compilation Shader stutters that happened when you're playing with this emulator but in general I would say that this emulator is perfectly playable after you get over those first initial stutters the power demands were not super high either I would say it capped out at about 15 watt so I think this will be a pretty good 3DS emulation machine let's stick with Nintendo for just a little bit more and talk about Wii U for this one I played everything at an upscale 1080p resolution and I found here that the performance was pretty great the average power demand was about 15 watts and you would also get those Shader compilation stutters but they are fewer and further between compared to something like 3DS of course when you start to ratchet things up to something that's a little bit harder to play like Legend of Zelda breath of the wild the power demand does go up as well so here I'm playing it at 720p resolution with a 40 frames per second cap and it is having a total power draw of about 27 Watts altogether that means if you are going to be playing this game I would expect about 2 hours of battery life okay next I want to move back to Microsoft we're going to talk about Xbox 360 here I'm using the latest build of Zenia Canary and it's running at a native resolution and unfortunately the performance here is kind of similar to what we saw with Xbox in the fact that the power demand is super high and the performance is super low so here we're pulling a really high wattage of about 32 watts on average but then also the performance just kind of Tanks I didn't find a single full Xbox 360 game that played well including Crackdown and Gears of War the games would either be extremely slow or you would see a bunch of stutters and skips for example here with Gears of War even when trying to emulate an XA game like geometry War evolved even at this native resolution it couldn't stay at a 60 frames per second and it was still pulling like 25 watts which is crazy so this is definitely a compatibility issue when it comes to this chipset and this emulator in particular and so this might be something that improves over time but at least right now it's not looking great next I want to talk about PlayStation 3 now again I'm going to be running everything in a native resolution and I'm using the latest build of rpcs3 and from a performance standpoint it wasn't terrible most of these games did play at full speed or something close to it however the power demand was still pretty high for example a lightweight game like After Burner climax required about 20 watts of total power that's not the end of the world you'll still get about 2 and 1 half hours of battery life but when you start playing a full game even something that's kind of like weight like Dead or Alive 5 it goes up a lot higher I was seeing an average of about 33 Watts with this game which is going to give you less than 2 hours and then I saw it Spike all the way up to like 44 Watts when it came to Prince of Persia now these 3D based games like Prince of Persia are a little bit harder to run not the hardest ones to run in the catalog but they are still pretty high up there so I think that for many games it won't require this full 44 Watts but I did want to mention that because it's only going to give you about an hour and 15 minutes altogether and from a performance standpoint I did find this lacking a little bit compared to something like the Rog Ally and the Z1 extreme chip the Rog Ally can pretty reliably play God of War 3 now the battery life is terrible on that one as well when playing that game but it was worse on the MSI claw Not only was it pulling like 44 Watts of power but it was getting nowhere close to a stable 30 frames per second instead it hovered more around like 22 so the performance here is worse than on the Rog Ally and it is still requiring just about the same amount of power and finally let's talk about the elephant in the room which is going to be Nintendo switch emulation this is another one that I've been thinking about a lot since Yuzu was taken down and I have decided that for Hardware benchmarks like this I am still going to show Nintendo switch emulation but using the Ryu Jinx emulator however bear in mind this will only be for hardware test so I do not plan on doing any sort of guides on how to get this up and running with that out of the way let's talk a little bit about the performance so I did find that the switch emulation performance was pretty impressive here on the MSI claw the power demands were quite high but that's pretty typical when it comes to switch emulation I'd say for the harder to play games you can expect somewhere between like 22 and 25 watts of total package power which means that you'll get about 2 hours of battery life Max when you're playing these harder to run games now the more lightweight games will probably average a little bit less so for example super Mario 3D World this one only takes about 18 Watts so you'll get a little bit over 2 hours here either way it does look like yes the Ryu Jinx emulator works pretty well on the MSI claw so if you are looking to do switch emulation this might be a compatible fit okay and that's really about it for this video I wanted to show off each of the major systems and how they each performed with the MSI claw in general I would say that these perform at a level very similar to something like the RG Ally or even the steam deck and the battery life was actually a little bit better than compared to something like PC Gam gaming where a normal game will only work for about 45 minutes before the battery dies here I did find when using emulation I got an average of about twice as long of battery life compared to PC gaming and I think a lot of this does have to do with the fact that the MSI claw right now is configured to be more CPU Reliant so I'm not saying that emulation is going to get better or worse in the future who knows what's really going to happen once they start tweaking the settings but I will say that at least right now with the exception of like the Xbox and Xbox 360 emulation is pretty darn good on the MSI claw right out of the box so let me know what you think in the comments down below does this change the Paradigm for you at all given the fact that this is pretty impressive for emulation performance or would you rather spend your money on something that's a little bit more reliable in the PC gaming space like a steam deck an Rog Ally or a Lenovo Legion go as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming 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Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 55,524

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Id: VJI5DHBIvuA

Length: 20min 35sec (1235 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024