in this video i'm going to show you guys the gaming handheld that 10 year old me
would have literally given six inches of height for if you hadn't already traded
it for this sweet footwear it's got high quality joysticks analog triggers an
enormous not to mention bright 7-inch display enough i o to rival modern
full-sized laptops and it managed to run
every game i could imagine throwing at it and i can imagine an awful lot it's
the ineo 2021 pro and its new retro
power colorway and upgraded specs put it in contention with the steam deck as the
best handheld gaming pc on the market i have been having a ton of fun with
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Linus
my love of mobile pc gaming started with installing zsnes on an old cast off
pentium one laptop that my sister's dad was discarding and to say that we've
come a long way since then would be a gross understatement compared to my ineo
founders the upgraded pro 2021 model
adds two additional CPU cores and smt
for a total of 16 CPU processing threads
and much more importantly it adds a vega 8 GPU
now on paper vega 8 is about 30 percent
wider and clocked about 15 percent higher than vegas 6 which not only puts
the neo 2021 pro ahead of the original neo but puts it within striking distance
of the upcoming steam deck featuring rdna 2 graphics
at least according to how the steam deck was performing back when i did my early
preview let's take a look at what that performance difference means in the real
world starting with one of the most common use cases for these handheld pcs
indie and casual pc games now 10 years ago there wasn't much in
the way of single-player controller optimized titles for pc but these days
steam is practically overrun with everything from niche cult favorites
like cross code to smash hits like among us and fall guys all of which run great
on the ineo pro the 16 by 10 7 inch
display is sharp enough at normal viewing distances that i don't consider
its 1280x800 resolution to be a problem and the speakers are markedly better
than first gen
to the point where i would consider them to be actually usable for gaming the
problem is that because these types of games typically target the lowest common
denominator for hardware they also run great on the original neo or on just
about anything making the cost of the 2021 pro really hard to justify that's
where we get into big use case number two emulation
now in theory any modern pc is so much more powerful than a console from a
couple of generations ago that running those games should be easy right but in
reality emulating functions that are not built into a machine's hardware can be
extremely demanding and this is where the additional horsepower of the neo
2021 pro is most felt older consoles like the super nintendo
playstation 1 and even playstation 2 run with ease check this out i've got final
fantasy 10 running at six times the original resolution with a widescreen
hack that's right that's not a pc port that's the playstation 2 version and
since i'm able to run this with the soc limited to just 11 watts i'd expect
anywhere from three and a half to four hours out of the 57 watt hour battery or
maybe more depending on the screen brightness side note i actually found
the indoor sweet spot for the screen was about 20
and even at minimum i found it too bright at night i also wasn't impressed
with the amount of corner backlight bleeds so i think there is some room for
improvement here the thing is as soon as you get into emulating anything more
modern though it gets a bit dicey for a couple of reasons first up is the fact
that the original hardware that you're trying to mimic is much more powerful
and second is that even for a four-year-old console like the nintendo
switch the enormous reverse engineering efforts of a project like yuzu just
plain take a lot of time which is why the ineo pro's performance is so
impressive i did have to crank it up to its 20 watt
TDP profile and wild fan mode which
admittedly isn't the greatest experience if you're not wearing headphones due to
the neopro's poorly implemented fan speed control
but it flipped and ran for best performance i turned mario tennis aces
down to about three quarters resolution and enabled AMD's fsr to smooth out the
jaggies now please note the flickering lines are a known issue on AMD gpus and
the yuzu team is aware of them but that shouldn't undermine the impressiveness
of the performance that we're seeing here of course mario tennis aces isn't
the most demanding nintendo game out there let's go back a generation to the
wii u version of the legend of zelda breath of the wild running in cemu
breath of the wild is a 30 FPS game so that's our target to ensure that the
physics is running in real time and at 20 watts in the wild fan profile
it actually runs really well just about
locked at 30 FPS in fact if we're willing to accept a couple of stutters
here and there like you'd get on the original nintendo switch we can turn it
down to even 15 watts and still have an acceptable experience this is actually a
good time to talk about the tool that i just used to do that it's called ispace
and it's a utility that i have built to make controlling the system a little bit
more convenient just hit the keyboard shortcut key on the right to bring it up
over top of any borderless windowed game or application it has an included
joystick to mouse utility that automatically switches modes
reasonably well bar some Windows navigation issues and within the slide
out here you've got volume brightness power profiles and a resolution changer
up top i actually really like this overlay and then the bottom buttons here
are configurable in the main application which is accessed by long pressing you
can also use isbase to browse your installed games right now they support
steam and microsoft games though supposedly support for other launchers
is coming and you can also add exes for unsupported applications like emulators
though i didn't see an obvious way to change the icon which i would like to do
you can also fine-tune the system to a surprising degree in here the neopro
2021 got upgraded linear actuators for its rumble that i actually found to be
too strong out of the box thankfully you can turn them down and they feel great
on the middle setting since we're in here by the way the ability to
recalibrate the joysticks is a huge deal we haven't talked about it much on this
channel but joystick drift is a problem that affects basically every modern
console or controller to some degree even a perfectly designed stick will
eventually drift as the internal components wear out so being able to
re-center them in software is an exciting idea that i kind of hope will
become more widely adopted in the future to keep otherwise good controllers out
of landfills just like our merch is always going to stay on the landfill
check out we got blank hoodies we're doing really cool printing on them
lttstore.com as for how good the controller is i give it a b minus
obviously some of my issues stem from the cramped nintendo switch style layout
but as someone who spent many hours on the switch that wasn't my main problem
compared to the original ineo the new leadership over there has a preference
for longer travel buttons that i just don't share i found the new abxy and
d-pad switches mushy and unresponsive
and i would like to see them changed or at the very least implemented in a way
that makes them swappable thankfully the joysticks felt comfortable and accurate
throughout my time with them and the new analog triggers are an absolute godsend
if you enjoy racing games that alone was enough for me to retire my founders
edition for good and it gets better the only real way to play aaa games on
previous handheld pcs was streaming from a cloud gaming service or a nearby
desktop and that changes with the neopro 2021 you name it it runs not at the
highest details mind you but turning down eye candy like shadows and texture
quality is a lot less noticeable on a seven inch screen than it is on a 24
inch screen and everything from doom eternal to forza horizon 5 to halo
infinite ran without complaint at anywhere between 30 to 60 FPS that's a
freaking game changer and the craziest part is this is just the beginning aya
has the new neonext coming out very soon that upgrades the CPU cores to zen3
which is a huge boon for emulation and boosts the clock speed of the onboard
vega 8 graphics now i'm hesitant to recommend that one just yet since i
actually find myself using the dedicated keys for escape control alt delete and
Windows quite often and it issues most of those but i'm going to reserve
judgment for once i have hands-on with it which should be pretty soon it's not
all sunshine and rainbows though i already talked about the loud fan in the
wild 20 watt profile but what i haven't discussed yet is the weight or battery
life perhaps the biggest ergonomic challenge is that compared to a device
like the switch OLED the neopro 2021 is
heavy to the point where i would almost never recommend using it without a
surface to rest your hands on also while the battery life was more than
acceptable in the more economical profiles we looped f1 2021 at the
highest performance profile and got just around two hours of battery life there's
no performance drop on battery which is good but that's less per charge than the
notorious sega game gear and obviously
it's a lot less than the switch if you don't mind being stuck with nintendo
games so i can understand then why some folks might look at this and say over a
thousand dollars why wouldn't i just buy a switch for a
few hundred that's fair but i can also see the other side of the argument where
one might hook up a bunch of mismatched controllers to game with their friends
or upgrade this baby could be a little more
accessible i ended up snapping a couple of the clips but i put an 8 terabyte
freaking SSD in here that crazy or you
could even put the retropower in its included dock to use it as a
full-fledged pc the wild card here is the steam deck of course which comes at
a much lower price and hopefully i'll be able to preview it for you soon enough
but who knows when that's actually going to ship
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you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out my previous first look at the steam
deck it is shaping up to be a really interesting year for handheld gaming