This week has been a bit of a weird one for gaming handhelds. The OneXFly F1 Pro, complete with a Strixpoint CPU and a price tag north of $1,000, finally went into a preorder phase, and now, Ayaneo has announced the Ayaneo 3 machine, which is also making the leap to AMD's Strix Point APUs.
As spotted by Videocardz, the new handheld has two distinct models, one housing the Ryzen 7 8840U spotted in the current iteration of the Ayaneo Kun, and one with the AMD Ryzen AI HX 370. The former has the 12 compute unit (CU), RDNA 3-driven Radeon 780M integrated graphics and the latter has the Radeon 890M with 16 RDNA 3.5 CUs.
As pointed out in our tests earlier this year, the 890M is a definite improvement, and it outperforms its competition, with 20% to 40% better performance than the 780M.
It's also worth pointing out that much of the mainstream gaming handheld market relies on a lot of the same basic specs. Take Acer's Nitro Blaze 7 as an example. Announced in september, it is kitted with the Ryzen 7 8840HS chip, which is the laptop version of the 8840U above.
It has not yet launched and doesn't have a price tag but I was surprised to see the lack of innovation in its specs and this is partially because of how stagnated the market has been around a handful of central chips.
There hasn't been zero innovation in handhelds, however. The main improvements seem to have revolved around screens, battery life, and so on.
This handheld will find it even harder to launch if it doesn't have a great price point, as many other premium devices will swap over to Strix Point, thanks to its better performance.
For fear of missing out on what's popular, it seems unlikely that Ayaneo and OneXPlayer are the only machines coming to market with these new chips, as many handhelds launching with older tech will be seen as inferior unless they come in at super-competitive price points.
CES 2025 is just a few months away, taking place at the start of January. If a company wants to make a splash with new hardware, this is the best way to do it, as consumers can hold them in their hands and play them immediately.
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The most expensive OneXPlayer F1 Pro model retails for $1,899 and there's no price yet on the new Ayaneo but that's a lot of money to put down on a machine like this. Ayaneo has been really hyping up this new device, saying "the future has arrived" mere weeks ago, and this is likely a partial justification for the price point of these new chips.
Although, that marketing hype seems a little overblown now we see what we're working with, which is more of the same kind of stuff we're used to from handhelds but with a next-gen slapped on top.
Only time will tell if it's worth the money, but I expect we'll see a lot more of them after the new year. Don't forget there are Intel Lunar Lake-powered handhelds to look out for, too. We've already seen the MSI Claw 8, so fingers crossed there's more to see come CES 2025.
