Remember: in December 2021, Qualcomm presented its Snapdragon G3x to the world, a new SoC designed and optimized specifically to equip a new generation of Android mobile gaming devices. Less than a year later, the very first commercial product equipped with this chip is about to be unveiled. It is indeed in just over two weeks, on October 15, 2022, that Razer will officially lift the curtain on the Edge 5G portable console. The presentation will take place during RazerCon.
A machine suitable for playing both in streaming and “locally”
This pre-announcement comes to us from the American telecom operator Verizon, the latest member of the trio of partners in charge of the development of this console. As its name suggests, the Edge 5G will be equipped with state-of-the-art cellular connectivity, which should notably open the doors to the cloud gaming on the go — the high speeds and, most importantly, low latency of 5G networks make them infinitely better suited for streaming gaming than their 4G counterparts.
But Verizon specifies from the outset that the machine will also be able to run games “locally” in excellent conditions. After all, that’s what Qualcomm already promised when it presented the Snapdragon G3x, highlighting the many advanced features of the on-chip GPU, such as hardware-accelerated texture mixing and support for Variable Rate Shading.
Specifications close to those of the development kit?
We will obviously have to wait for the formal presentation of October 15 to find out more about the technical specifications of the console. However, we would not be surprised if the machine has many points in common with the Snapdragon G3x development kit, which Qualcomm has been offering developers since last December, and whose manufacture it had entrusted to … Razer. For the record, this development kit was distinguished in particular by the use of a luxurious 6.65-inch 1080p Oled screen, with support for HDR and refresh rate at 120 Hz (the G3x could even theoretically serve rates ranging from up to 144Hz).
It remains of course to wonder if such an abundance can be kept on a commercial product without causing its selling price to soar. As a reference, the Logitech G Cloud, optimized only for cloud gaming and equipped with a very ordinary 60 Hz LCD screen, will be launched this fall in the United States for the price of $ 349 all the same. Conversely, Valve’s Steam Deck, with its AMD APU of unparalleled power for a mobile machine, can be purchased at the floor price of €419 “only” in Europe. But it should be remembered that Valve is based on a completely different business model from Razer and Logitech: almost all of its income comes from the sale of games on Steam, and the company can therefore afford to earn almost no revenue. money, or even lose a little, on hardware sales.
Note that in light of the partnership with Verizon, a company operating only in the United States, it is unfortunately unlikely that the Razer Edge 5G will be marketed outside US borders, at least initially.