The PGS promises PC gaming in the palm of your hands

The idea of making PC gaming portable isn’t a new one, but it’s not ben a particularly fruitful endeavour. Many have come and gone, promising to thrust PC gaming in to the mobile age, but very nearly all of them have ended up being vapourware, or just plain failures.

And here’s a new one on Kickstarter. The cynical grumpy bastard who lives in my skin believes it’ll be relegated to the same fate, even though it sounds pretty interesting on paper.

Called the PGS, or less interesting and terribly unimaginative Portable Games System, the system looks a little like a slim Wii U gamepad with another screen duct-taped to it. It’s already been funded, and will ship in two versions. The PGS Lite will feature a 5.5-inch screen, 1280×720 resolution, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage, while the more capable PGS Hardcore will sport a 5.7-inch screen, 2560×1440 resolution, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage.

It seems pretty cool, save for the actual processing muscle. The PGS will use Intel’s Atom x7-Z8750 microprocessor which will power its two, dual-bootable operating systems: Android 6 Marshmallow and Windows 10. That’s just not powerful enough if you ask me, and according to the kickstarter you can expect sub-30 frame rates on medium settings on last gen games. The list of cited games include Arkham City, Mirror’s Edge, Dark Souls 2 and DmC.

Perhaps more useful will be its streaming features. According to the Kickstarter you’ll be able to stream from Steam, Xbox One or PlayStation 4 – which is really on obvious thing given that it runs Windows 10. It’s a lot of tech for the system’s price – but I worry that there’s a bit of over promising going on, with inevitable under-delivering. What do you think? Viable product, or vapourware candidate?

You can see the system and its promises at the official site, here.

 

Last Updated: July 7, 2016