Benchmark leaks for the new Intel Battlemage GPU found in the MSI Claw 2 have started to surface, and this latest one appears to show that it offers nearly double the performance of the Steam Deck GPU. The forthcoming MSI Claw 2 is set to use the new Intel Lunar Lake chip, which has just appeared in a listing on the Geekbench results browser in the Vulkan test.
Vulkan is an open-source API that can be used as an alternative to DirectX, and it’s used in both games and professional applications. You can run Baldur’s Gate 3 and Doom Eternal in Vulkan rather than DirectX, for example. Geekbench might be a synthetic benchmark, but it does give an indication of GPU performance, and it looks as though the Steam Deck could soon have a rival from MSI on our guide to the best handheld gaming PC.
According to the purported Intel Lunar Lake Vulkan result on the Geekbench browser, which was spotted by Benchleaks on X (formerly Twiter), the new chip gets a total score of 34,181, while the Steam Deck only scores 18,513 in the same test.
That’s an 84.6% increase when you step up from the Steam Deck’s aging AMD silicon to the Lunar Lake chip. The new Intel chip, which is set to be used in the new MSI Claw 2, is faster across the board in the individual tests, but there are some notable areas that stand out.
For example, the background blur and face detection parts of the test are nearly twice as fast on the new Intel chip, but there’s not much separating the two chips when it comes to edge detection. One area where the new Battlemage GPU excels is stereo matching, where it hits a score of 137,865, while the Steam Deck only manages a score of 56,544, representing a 143.8% performance increase from Lunar Lake.
Originally launched in 2022, the custom AMD Van Gogh chip inside both the Steam Deck, and the new Steam Deck OLED, is now showing its age. Its GPU is based on the last-gen AMD RDNA 2 architecture, with 512 stream processors and eight RT cores. It’s already been outgunned by AMD’s new Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip, which is used in the Asus ROG Ally, and has a Radeon 780M GPU based on the current (and superior) RDNA 3 GPU architecture, with 12 compute units (768 stream processors).
As a point of comparison, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme in the Asus ROG Ally scores 35,534 in the Geekbench Vulkan test, which puts it in the same ballpark as the new Intel Lunar Lake chip. AMD’s top silicon is still slightly ahead in this game, but Intel is catching up fast, and the aging chip in the Steam Deck is being left behind.
If this benchmark leak holds up to be true, then the MSI Claw 2 could have some formidable handheld gaming power under the hood. However, the bigger problem for MSI will be the user experience and Intel driver updates, with the first round of MSI Claw reviews giving a damning verdict on the new handheld when it came to bugs.
If you’re looking to buy a powerful new Windows-based handheld, check out our Lenovo Legion Go review, where we take this Ryzen Z1 Extreme-based device for a spin.
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