Your guide to a better future
The company’s spring announcement event brings SpatialLabs’ 3D technology to its Predator gaming line, expands its roster of sustainable products and buffs up many more.
Lori Grunin
Senior Editor / Reviews
I’ve been writing about and reviewing consumer technology since before the turn of the century. I’m also a photographer and cat herder, frequently at the same time.
Acer Next, the company’s May announcement event, dropped a multitude of products on us — mostly a raft of refreshes. We saw updates to existing models including the Spin 5, Swift 3 and Predator gaming laptops with current-generation processors and some design tweaks. One move in particular stands out, though: Acer’s expanding its SpatialLabs technology to bring glasses-free stereoscopic 3D to games. It’ll do this with a 15-inch 4K display, which will be offered as a standalone monitor and built in to one of its Predator Helios 300 gaming laptops.
SpatialLabs launched at last year’s May Acer Next in conjunction with new hardware in Acer’s Concept D line of creator-focused gear and an Unreal Engine developer program. Hence, new games supporting the technology. «Support» means the developer has created a profile for the game, which loads when you launch it via the new TrueGame application, along with the ancillary files necessary to render properly to the display. An ancillary app, SpatialLabs Go, will allow the computer to render stereoscopic 3D from most content that can be displayed full screen. The content is rendered to deliver the impression that nearer parts of the scene appear in front of the display (rather than rendering as if further objects were behind it, as the illustration above implies).
Rear view of the SpatialLabs View portable monitor.
Acer says more than 50 games will support the display, dubbed Acer SpatialLabs View, when it becomes available this summer starting at $1,099. New games will be added to the roster on a regular basis. It doesn’t sound like a display you’d want for fast-moving games, given its 60Hz refresh rate and response time of up to a whopping 30ms. (For comparison, a decent response time for a gaming monitor is closer to 5ms or less.) There will also be a commercially oriented version of the monitor, the SpatialLabs View Pro, intended for kiosks and other sales and marketing uses.
The Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition.
The monitor can run off battery, though for how long we don’t know. The battery does explain why it’s relatively heavy — at roughly 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms), it weighs as much as a laptop. Other specs include a maximum brightness of 400 nits, typically 323 nits, and 100% coverage of the Adobe RGB gamut.
You’ll find the screen in the Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition, which also gets a bump up to a maximum of an Intel Core i9-12900H CPU, 32GB DDR5-4800 and PCIe 4 SSD. It’s slated to ship in October starting at $3,400.
Acer has also added a 16-inch model to its Predator Triton 300 SE line, and brings the thin-ish 14-inch model up to date with 12th-gen Intel Core processors, LPDDR5-5200 RAM, PCIe 4 SSD and new display choices, including OLED. The smaller model ships in July starting at $1,600, and the 16-inch model will be available in August, starting at $1,750.
The company has also revved its gaming monitors, bringing the 27-inch XB273 up to 4K at 160Hz with DisplayHDR 600 certification and the Nitro XV272 up to 1440p 144Hz (overclocked to 170Hz on DisplayPort) with a peak brightness of 400 nits. Both are expected to ship between July and September, with the Predator starting at $999 and the Nitro at $449.
Acer Aspire Vero 14-inch model.
Acer’s eco-friendly product line gets some new members, adding a 14-inch laptop with a Full HD screen and a new blue choice to the existing Aspire Vero 15-inch option, bumping both to 12th-gen Intel Core processors. A 24-inch Vero Veriton All-in-One desktop, 24- and 27-inch monitors (the larger model has a KVM switch and supports power delivery), keyboard and projector join the the lineup, expanding Acer’s use of post-consumer recycled plastic to a wider variety of products.
Acer Veriton all-in-one with matching accessories.
The Veriton desktop incorporates 30% PCR materials, and some components are upgradable. It has a popup webcam, up to 12th-gen Core i9 and GeForce MX550 processors, supports up to 64GB DDR4 memory and takes advantage of some of the Intel chipset updates, such as Wi-Fi 6E.
For low-end projecting, the Vero PD2325W offers a low 1,280×800-pixel resolution and low light output of 2,200 lumens. It does have auto keystone correction (to fix vertical distortion) and can be mounted to the ceiling.
A new version of the Swift 3 has a 2,880×1,800-pixel OLED display (DisplayHDR True Black 500 certified) and upgrades to an H-series 12th-gen Core i7 processor — that’s the higher power CPU line — and upgrades to LPDDR5 memory and PCIe 4 SSD.
The Spin 5 has a higher-resolution display with thinner bezels.
In addition to a slight redesign that has much more attractive, thinner bezels on the screen, the 14-inch Spin 5’s display gets a minor boost in resolution to 2,560×1,600 pixels. It also works with the upgraded Acer Active Stylus (Wacom AES 2.0), and gets bumped to the latest generation of core processors, LPDDR5 memory, PCIe 4 SSD, Wi-Fi 6E and more. The Spin 3’s bezels have also gotten a bit narrower and now uses 12th-gen Intel CPUs as well.
Acer also updated the $750 Chromebook Spin 714’s screen and components to keep it fresh and competitive, and launched a rugged tablet, the $400 Chromebook Tab 510. The 10.1-inch tablet is built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 Compute Platform, with a 1,920×1,00-pixel screen, 5- and 8-megapixel MIPI cameras (front and rear) and includes a dockable stylus. Acer claims an 11-hour battery life and says it meets MIL-STD 810H standards for durability. The Chromebook Spin 714 ships in August while the Tab will be available in July.
The company’s lightweight business laptops, the TravelMate P4 and TravelMate Spin P4 and the more workhorse P2, jump to the vPro versions of its 12th-gen CPUs as well as AMD’s Ryzen Pro (up to Ryzen 7) equivalents; you’ll have both 14- and 16-inch options for the P4. The P4 and P2 also incorporate more PCR plastic into their construction.
They’ll all become available in the third quarter of 2022. The P4 models start at $1,099, the Spin P4s at $1,199, and the Spin P2 at $899.
And finally, Acer boosted its Concept D 5 and 5 Pro laptops and Concept D 500 and 100 desktops with the latest generation Intel Core CPUs and Nvidia RTX GPUs. The compact, entry-level Concept D 100 still uses last-gen T series GPUs, however, and neither has been bumped to DDR5. And it looks like only the D 5 will be available in the US, at least for now; it ships in August starting at $2,500.
