If you can take Mario Kart and Breath of the Wild on the train, then why not Overwatch?
For the last few months, Chase Cobb has been working on a prototype project: a gaming PC that was “ultra portable”. Called Project Scout, it’s a portable PC with a i3-6100U CPU (with a HD 520 onboard GPU) and 8GB of RAM into a tiny unit with a 7-inch 1280×800 panel. There’s a 250GB SSD in there for storage, along with Bluetooth support and dual band AC Wi-Fi.
The prototype unit doesn’t have a battery or a touchscreen, and Cobb says in the video that the hardware isn’t the final package yet. That’s important, because you can see in the video that it doesn’t run Overwatch at a flat 60fps, although games like Psychonauts and Guacamelee look playable enough. The device is also capable of acting as a client for Steam’s streaming service (if you wanted to offload the grunt work from your main gaming PC).
He notes that it seems like a perfect device for Nvidia’s new Max-Q engineering design, and it’d be fascinating to see what could be done with AMD’s Ryzen-based APUs when they become commercially available later this year. Cobb noted in the YouTube comments that a Kickstarter campaign could be an option down the road, although it’s very early days and with the existing hardware it would still cost more than a Switch or a regular console.
But let’s run a little thought experiment for a second. If someone came to you and said here’s a portable, Switch-esque gaming PC that would run basically all indie games and Overwatch at a flat 60fps on a small-ish screen at 720p, how much would you be prepared to pay?
Comments
10 responses to “Here’s Overwatch Running On A Handheld PC”
I can’t help but think… why would you want to play PC Overwatch without a mouse 😛
You’d get stomped online lol
There’s characters that have autoaim abilities or ones like Mercy etc. where you could play effectively on PC with a controller.
ehh, I play overwatch on PC with a controller occasionally, i still do fairly well with most heroes. basically all but Ana, Widow and mcree are at least possible to do decent with.
An i3 with a HD520 is basically garbage, surely the switch runs rings around it. So when blizzard said they couldn’t bring overwatch to the switch, they basically could.
So this device is a worse switch. And since the switch is getting Rainway, it could even stream overwatch anyway…
As a project, this is a neat device, but as a marketable product it’s doomed.
Except that in modern gaming CPU is more of a bottleneck than GPU, which this device even while under clocked runs faster. The ram difference is also likely a factor.
Other than that I agree that this isn’t going anywhere.
I agree with that right now, but as it says in the article the ryzen APUs will be a whole different story. They are supposed to have the same power use as the i3 but will have an IGPU likely as good as the RX 550 and the CPU cores are just as good as intels.
I’d rather buy another Vita.
I’m gonna strap my Vita and PSP together now with electrical tape for 27% more agpcup gigachops of processing.
I’d be interested if the wifi module is decent enough to stream Steam from my desktop like I do with my laptop atm.
The funny thing about that is that the Switch is not an original design. There were already “Switch-esque” gaming PCs before it even came out like the NVidia Shield and Razer Edge Pro. In fact, I saw a number of comments suspecting that NVidia pairing up with Nintendo was an attempt to find a market for the Shield concept.
Precisely.