There are plenty of PC gaming handhelds to choose from these days, but Acer hopes to stand out in a big way with its new Nitro Blaze 8 (8.8-inch screen) and Nitro Blaze 11 (10.95-inch screen) sporting some of the biggest displays we’ve seen from these kinds of devices to date. And with a 2560 x 1600 resolution on both devices and 144 Hz for the smaller device and 120 Hz for the larger one, there are plenty of pixels to push here, too.
Those high-res, high-refresh IPS screens are certainly going to push (and exceed) the limit of current silicon with many AAA games. But if you were hoping Acer had something new on hand to power its handhelds, both are powered by AMD’s Ryzen 7 8840HS CPU, with the same 780M found in the Z1 Extreme chip housed in Asus’ ROG Ally. At the very least, expect to be relying heavily on AMD’s upscaling tech in many games.
Acer’s specs say both devices have a 55 Whr battery, which is more than the original Ally (40 Whr) and the Steam Deck OLED (50 Whr), but a lot less than the Ally X’s 80 Whr battery. Both devices also come with 16GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage alongside their Ryzen 7 8840HS chips, and the touchscreens on both models are rated to 500 nits of brightness. For some reason, Acer is also prominently calling out the CPUs’ 39 total AI TOPS. In short, given the specs, I wouldn’t expect the new Nitros to stand out in terms of frame rates or battery life. But they're definitely bigger than much of the competition.
