Qualcomm has announced three new chipsets to power different tiers of handheld gaming consoles – Snapdragon G1 Gen 1, Snapdragon G2 Gen 1, and Snapdragon Gen3x Gen 2. Let’s take a look.

Snapdragon G series: Meet the 3 New Chips

The company unveiled three new processors today (August 24, 2023). The Snapdragon G series is designed specifically for handheld gaming consoles. The Snapdragon G1 chip is for handheld game streaming models that offer up to 10 hours of battery life on Wi-Fi. The Snapdragon G2 offers full-featured mobile and cloud gaming with 5G connectivity. The highlight of the announcement is the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2, which will compete with PC gaming handhelds.

How do they compare to other handheld rivals?

The G3x Gen 2 isn’t simply a beefed-up smartphone processor and promises 2x GPU performance over its first-gen model. Its CPU also offers a 30% bump in performance. But even with these specs, the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 doesn’t match up to the Steam Deck’s AMD Aerith APU. Although Qualcomm’s gaming director Mithun Chandrasekhar claimed that he can “theoretically crank the performance to 2GHz and beat the living shit out of other handheld devices, then you’d get 30 minutes of battery life.”

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Which Handheld consoles will feature the new chips?

The Snapdragon G series processors have already caught interest from console makers. One of the more recognizable names is Ayaneo, who is a known name in the handheld gaming scene. The company recently announced a bunch of handheld consoles and will be building new models that feature the new gaming processors. However, a big hurdle faced by Qualcomm is that the chips run on Android, so it remains to be seen if any titles take full advantage of this new technology.