Tag: pcs

There comes a point in every consumer tech writer’s career where they have to lie down on the railroad tracks and take the heat for a tech category nobody else believes in. For me, it’s stereoscopic, glasses-less 3D screens. So when I agreed to test the Abxylute 3D One, a tablet-sized handheld PC, it only made my lust for stereoscopic screens grow ever more heated.

The 3D One is a kitchen sink handheld that throws so much stuff at the wall that something is bound to stick. Sure, it’s big and heavy—especially at 2.45 pounds with the controllers attached—but it also houses a huge screen, removable gamepads akin to the Switch 2, a keyboard that attaches to the bottom like a Microsoft Surface Pro 12, and the horsepower of an Intel mobile chip used in the solid MSI Claw 8 handheld. It misses out on anything resembling good battery life for its size, despite its good performance. Beyond all else, the 3D One fails to deliver on its main promise. Based on my tests with a pre-production unit Abxylute sent me for review, you can get a 3D effect in all your games, but they weren’t playable by any stretch of the imagination.

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Could the 3D One ever be my one handheld I take everywhere? Of course not. Look at the size of that thing. In its plus-sized case, it would take up most of the room in my backpack, whereas a laptop and a controller would eat half that space. The “handheld” is up on Kickstarter now for an early-bird price of $1,500, but it will sell for more later. This is very cool tech, even if it’s expensive. For mostly selfish reasons, I’m hoping some updates will see the 3D One pick up steam. I don’t want the dream of 3D screens to die.

Handheld PCs keep getting bigger, not necessarily better

I first spied the 3D One at CES 2025 on a forlorn shelf within Intel’s demo room. Back then, Intel only described it as an effort with Chinese games publisher Tencent on a 3D handheld. The 3D One sports an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V “Lunar Lake” CPU, which has proved a strong contender even with the most recent AMD handheld APUs (accelerated processing units). The Lunar Lake chip inside the 3D One offers just enough juice to game at the device’s max resolution in some titles.

I’m not a huge person. I rarely hold tech that makes me feel small. While other people think near-9-inch gaming handhelds like the Lenovo Legion Go 2 are too mammoth for their miniature digits, you don’t know what a big handheld feels like until you get to grips with the Abxylute 3D One. It includes an 11-inch IPS LCD display that runs at 2,560 x 1,600 resolution with a 120Hz refresh rate, which is equivalent to many 14- or even 16-inch laptop screens. For comparison, the Legion Go 2 can go to 1200p, while most 7-inch devices like the $1,000 Asus ROG Xbox Ally X max out at 1080p and 120Hz refresh rate.

The display is decent for a handheld of this size, though it may not be as bright as other LCD screens at its peak of 480 nits. The display is also a little too reflective for playing underneath any bright lights, but games end up seeming extra beautiful when pushed to the system’s max resolution, even ignoring the 3D effect. Audio-wise, there’s not much here to set it apart from any other handheld, big or small. Even when pushing the volume to its limit, it won’t fill a room with sound.

The case also comes with a controller attachment point for the two Legion Go-like removable controllers. I could play from a comfortable sitting position even when I didn’t want to prop the device up with my arms on my lap. You just have to hunker close to the 3D One to use it, or else hook it up to a monitor. Despite the size of the two removable controllers, I found the face buttons to be clicky and responsive. I didn’t have to reposition my hand that much to inch a finger around for the bumpers and triggers. The back ridges aren’t ergonomic enough to feel form-fitted for my hand. Otherwise, I could still use them as separate controllers or alongside the screen. There are also two touchpads, one on each controller, though only the right one seems to offer any mouse controls.

The keyboard does a lot of the heavy lifting to make Windows 11 usable on a device that would normally have to rely on the touchscreen or trackpads to get anything done. The keys on the device feel particularly nice and hit with a small though satisfying clacking sound. The keyboard’s touchpad is not my cup of tea and feels too rough and sticky despite its minuscule size. Hell, you could treat this as an overlarge, somewhat janky laptop. I did get some work done on the 3D One while on vacation. Was it worth the hassle of dragging it around? Probably not.

While I could feel safe in my efforts to use the 3D One like any other gaming handheld—albeit one that adds more muscle on my shoulders holding it aloft—my desperate attempts to turn it into a modern Nintendo 3DS went awry.

What’s up with the stereoscopic screen?

Abxylute told me it went with such a large display because, in their tests, this is the screen size needed to show off the 3D effect properly. The 3D One isn’t offering customers what many think of when they hear the word “3D screen.” You won’t see images pop out at you like an annoying jack-in-the-box at a horror-themed carnival. Instead, the screens are essentially showing an offset image to your left and right eyes individually. Your brain combines them into a singular image with the effect that makes some elements on the screen pop. Cool, right? Well, it gets even more interesting. The 3D One uses the built-in front-facing camera to track your eyes. Even if you’re off-center, you should still be able to see the 3D image. It’s the same type of technology employed by the Samsung Odyssey 3D I tested earlier this year. That display was capable of 4K resolution with 165Hz, though it required a beefy computer to run games with the 3D effect.

This screen works for the most part, but if you swim too fast in and out of view, the handheld’s eye tracking will struggle to keep up. You need to maintain position when playing with the 3D effect, though you’re punished less for shifting around. A single switch near the top of the device (you can also enable it through the system’s quick menu) lets you swap between 2D and 3D modes. There are certain games that Abxylute says support the stereoscopic screen natively. Otherwise, the handheld will employ an “AI 3D Mode” that takes an image in 2D and transforms it into 3D. The company said it hopes to eventually support more than 50 games with native 3D rendering through Steam.

In my tests, the 3D effect immediately made games run sluggishly, to the point they were practically unplayable. After days of going back and forth with Abxylute, the company told me I need to play games at specific settings, without V-Sync and AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling, and at the max resolution to get the full 3D effect. These restrictions already hamper performance, but the 3D effect doesn’t seem to be impacting frame rates specifically. In supported games like Baldur’s Gate III, the frame rate would remain above 30 despite it feeling like it was running at 15. This could be due to latency or some other factor from the system essentially duplicating the screen for the sake of your eyeballs.

Performance was a consistent issue when trying it out with games like Hogwarts Legacy with native 3D support. Abxylute suggested I try a much less intensive game, Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy. That game runs much better on a handheld, and yet I experienced similar lag issues that forced me to turn off the 3D every time. Even when I dropped the graphics settings as low as they would go, lighter games struggled to perform. I also tried numerous games supported with a special 2D to 3D mod. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Injustice 2 both became completely unplayable with the 2D to 3D effect.

How about movies and 3DS emulation?

If I wasn’t just interested in playing modern titles with 3D effects, what else is there? I put on Netflix to watch a few shows with the 3D effect on, and through streaming, I found there was very little lag. Animated shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender may add a small, though noticeable, effect to pop out images in the foreground, though it can make other shots look more blurry than they should be. You won’t get much of an effect in other media, however.

There are a few other 3D systems out there not made by Abxylute. Unfortunately, Samsung’s Reality Hub software created for the Odyssey 3D monitor isn’t compatible with anything but a Samsung device. Russ Crandall from the Retro Game Corps YouTube channel described using the ReShade plugin to enable a native stereoscopic effect in unsupported games. You need to force it to install on specific games and adjust other game settings to create the double image needed for the 3D effect. I tried forcing this on games like Metaphor: Refantazio and Hades II. Unfortunately, the result still generated too much input lag to be playable.

Emulators for the Nintendo 3DS, like Azahar, also support a 3D effect for use in games.  Crandall reported in his video that 3DS emulation is especially good on the 3D One, so score one point for Abxylute. Although, spending upwards of $1,500 on a handheld seems extreme when you can simply buy an old 3DS and original game cards for much less.

A strong performer with weak battery life

Like the MSI Claw 8, the Intel chip housed inside can match up to and even beat the latest AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip found in handhelds like the Xbox Ally X—at least in some 3DMark benchmarks. That, combined with the extra-large screen buoyed with bountiful resolution options, means you can get a surprising number of recent titles to run well.

The Intel chip makes use of the company’s Arc 140V GPU, which is a strong contender more than a year after the chip was first announced. When testing the 3D One at its highest 30W TDP, or thermal design power, the handheld beat the Xbox Ally X in 3D Mark’s Steel Nomad test by around 100 points and in the Time Spy test by 200 points. The 3D One performed slightly under par in the Steel Nomad Light tests. In Cyberpunk 2077, it would hit around 45 fps with Steam Deck graphics settings at 1080p, whereas the Xbox Ally X could do 52 fps at 35W TDP. That’s not a big gulf considering AMD’s latest handheld chips squeaked into position at the tail end of this year.

When testing out our usual stack of benchmarking games, I found I could achieve playable frame rates at the max 2,560 x 1,600 without much fuss, so long as I limited graphics settings and relied on AMD’s FSR upscaling to push the needle a few more points in the right direction. That was the case with Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam Deck settings and Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Medium.

In the careful balancing act between resolution and performance, you may eventually need to adjust down. For example, if I wanted to get a playable frame rate in Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered at Very High settings, I needed to drop the resolution down to 1080p.

The tradeoff with any larger screen is that you will notice when the graphics don’t look quite as good as soon as you drop your graphics settings. A smaller display does a lot to reduce any obvious graphical blemishes or muddy textures. That’s why Abxylute’s mandate for max resolution for native 3D games hurts all the more. You want those beautiful foreground colors to pop, and while the screen is good enough for it, the chip may not have enough power to showcase the best textures in Trine 5, even when they’re leaping off the screen.

The other issue is battery life. This 3D One has a measly 50Wh battery, which is far less than the Xbox Ally X’s 80Wh. In most AAA games set at max resolution, I could barely squeak out more than an hour of game time. Less demanding titles would do a little better, closer to two hours.

Why can’t we have nice things?

The 3D One is usable, so long as you transform your gamer lifestyle to fit Abxylute’s design. If you had the heart for it, you could turn this into a laptop, though with a terrible trackpad and a battery life that won’t meet your expectations. The concept behind this device is brilliant. Based on my tests, it just doesn’t have the power necessary to meet those expectations.

Is it worth $1,500 at minimum? Well, it’s a Kickstarter, so that opening price won’t stick around for long. Gaming handhelds are already way too expensive, but there may be somebody out there who imagines they need something this large in their life, and that they want a screen that is similarly larger than life.

At least, we finally found the perfect handheld for people with Shaq-sized hands.