The handheld gaming with a limited life-span was reviewed by the Asus ROG Ally
Review of the ROG Ally: Windows for the Insturment of Gamma-ray Bose-Einstein Handhelds
The vast majority of the work on the insturment is done on Windows-based stores, and onlySteam is prepared for a handheld interface. Steam’s Big Picture mode is designed for everything from handhelds to TVs, and it’s the default interface for the Steam Deck. When launching the Ally, you can find it, but other stores are just scaled-down versions of their desktop app.
When we put the Ally into hibernate mode, it meant we lost more battery than if we stuck with downloads and didn’t adjust the power button. None of the Ally’s other controls wake it, since none are recognised by Windows until the system is awake.
UI isn’t the only issue with Windows gaming handhelds. Another example that didn’t quite make it into our Ally review: Windows portables go into an internet-connected “Modern Standby” mode when you press the power button, theoretically letting you download games and quickly resume an in-progress game while the system’s saving battery.
I hope this is a wake-up call for Microsoft. There have been a few of those recently, and maybe one of them will be the final straw. It always comes down to the conflicting incentives of theXbox and thewindows division, as the company has a long and troubled history supporting games on Windows. As far as Microsoft actually building that new UI for handheld devices, Krohn says he hasn’t heard anything more than I have.
In the review we published today for the ROG Ally, we loved the performance and screen but found that Windows still causes some issues squeezed into such a small device. It’s not clear if the changes at the operating system level are related to individual games, or if Microsoft just wants to bring quality-of-life features from the console to Windows.
My colleague Tom Warren points out that Sones has made similar comments before. During another ROG Ally event in April, she discussed working with publishers on the “experience layer” required for these features.
The ROG Ally is available in a performance mode which is slightly faster than the steam deck, but still somewhat less electricity, as I explain above. There, I feel comfortable playing games like Elden Ring at full screen, and it’s a game that my Steam deck won’t run as fast. But if you’re plugged in, or willing to play games for less than an hour at a time, the “Turbo” mode puts games within reach that the Deck can barely play at all.
Max Payne 2: The Sands of Time didn’t run on the ROG Ally and the Steam Deck, so I tried to recover my password
It sounds minor, but connecting to Wi-Fi is one of the first, most basic aspects of setting up a device, and I was already annoyed. This was a theme that kept on popping up. I felt myself struggling against the form factor of the Ally. I was taken out of the game in a hurry while playing on the Windows desktop, and there was a black box filling the entire screen. What did it take to get an interruption? “Your battery is running low. You might want to plug in your PC.”
The problem I was having with connecting to wireless was the onscreen keyboard I used to enter my password. It failed to register several letters. To correct the mistakes I had to hold on to the “show password” icon while stretching my fingers to make sure they weren’t messed up.
The game Max Payne 2 doesn’t run perfectly on the Ally and the Steam Deck, even though they say it does. The entire game is built around dodging bullets in slow-motion “Bullet Time” while you’re shooting, but I could not pull the trigger while using the joystick. The default keyboard bindings make little sense in other ways, too, completely omitting common keys like C (crouch) and E (interact) and inexplicably binding Escape to the B button while the gamepad’s View and Menu buttons (used to summon menus in XInput games!) stay completely unbound. I had to redo most of the controls, but still lacked any form of precision aim, because there was no gyro and no easy custom sensitivity.
The first time I launched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on the ROG Ally, it crashed. It crashed again when I tried to access the graphical settings and then when I tried to load part of the first level, it threw strange error messages. I had to download a special widescreen fixer patch to get it to run at all. Then, I ran into some of the same issues with the keyboard template and triggers: no way to land a jumping sword combo, no way to crouch or drop to a lower ledge, no way to stab with the Dagger of Time without remapping all of my controls.
The first time I put it on the deck, it worked. The 2003 Windows game ran in Linux, tricky-to-render fog and all. It loaded my community controller profile and bound my buttons the same way I remembered on the PS2. I made a fix to the camera problem in 10 seconds by taking the controller out of my hand and turning it off. And that widescreen Windows patch? The files were dropped into my game folder with zero modification and they worked right away.
The ROG Ally: A portable gaming PC that is not just for the road, but for the adventure in the Sands of Time (Rands of time, by Dan Krohn)
I believe a portable gaming PC is not portable if the battery life and user interface are not built for the road. I also believe most people interested in this machine would be better off spending $300 more for our favorite gaming laptop (by Asus, no less). If you really want a portable, save a couple hundred bucks by buying a $400 steam deck and Adding your own smallSSD.
In fact, frankly, the ROG Ally has incredible range, letting you configure it all the way down to just 7W TDP or up to a boosted 35W TDP for short periods on a handheld battery pack. If you use the 65 watt power cord, you can sometimes get a small additional boost of speed, because the Steam Deck can’t run all games at the same time. You can plug in an external graphics card if you have a special port with eight PCI-Express lanes.
I am not sure if the stopgap solution is Steam. Maybe the Ally should run Steam OS 3.0 instead of Windows if Valve makes it broadly available. I am not sure how much steamOS and eGPUs will continue to be supported by AMD, or whether it will support them fully.
Speaking of rivalries, Microsoft may have also precluded the ROG Ally’s SteamOS possibilities: “our partner for this device is Microsoft, it’s primarily made as a Windows device, and it’s made only as a Windows device,” says Krohn. But he’s not sure if the deal precludes Asus from supporting SteamOS if users install it themselves.
The most demanding games can be found on Steam Deck for as little as 6 watt on a charge, and I can usually squeeze in 2 hours from titles like Control with a tweak or two. I am seeing an hour and a half with the Ally. You can see how much power the title consumes with the PC port of PS2’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23719210/asus-rog-ally-review
The Rog Ally Gamepad: Windows, the Xbox Gamepad, and the Facebook Gamepad (Rogally) Unfriendly. Review of Microsoft and Steam
When we asked why Windows. It was said that it was what the player wanted because they could not have left any of their games behind.
Perhaps most importantly, there’s no Xbox button on this PC. The gamePad controls on Steam and Microsoft’s own Game Bar are incomplete, because there is no easy way to summon the controls that Valve and Microsoft recommend you to use. At some point in the future, we will have the option of assigning the main console button to different buttons on the ROG Ally, according to the company’s spokesman.
The split keyboard is not meant for the places you will hold it in your hand. Scrolling websites and documents by joystick happens in fits and starts rather than smoothly as it does on a Steam Deck. The most obvious improvement is a half-height taskbar that saves space on the Ally’s screen, but it often shows up on my desktop monitor as a normal taskbar cut in half. Windows 11 is easier to navigate by touchscreen than any previous version, but I really don’t want to have to touch my screen when the joysticks are right there.
Windows still does not feel familiar on a seven-inch gamepad. There is nothing like the kind of experimentation Microsoft did in a September 22nd Hackathon that we know about. You can’t do things like type in letters using the left joystick or D-pad without leaving fingerprints, and you have to use your right joystick topeck each letter.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23719210/asus-rog-ally-review
The Verge doesn’t review things you can see or touch: Asus Rogueally Reveals Armoury Crate Commands
Frankly, the Steam Deck had even nastier issues at launch, but I have to say the same thing I said then: The Verge doesn’t review gadgets on potential. We review what we can see and touch.
The current version of armoury crate is not ship to consumers because it hangs on my review unit, which is a plus for me because my gamepad controls stop working at that point. Just this Tuesday, I was playing Control when, all of a sudden, I couldn’t shoot or dash or jump or run or do anything except walk and look around. I couldn’t access the controller configurator to check what had happened, either, or switch my controls between desktop and gamepad modes because the entire service had crashed. It took a full reboot to bring my controls back.
Consumers shouldn’t see it because it was already caught before production and retail units will have slightly larger keys that wont get caught underneath.
But Asus made two unfortunate design choices I’m very much hoping you’ll never see. It created flat face buttons that are close to the console when depressed. The company decided to use its own software to deploy its gamepad controls. Let’s take these one at a time.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23719210/asus-rog-ally-review
Smooth Gameplay and Battery Life of the Z1 Extreme: An AMD Radeon Viewpoint from Asus April Fools’ Day Announcement
It’s much simpler to swap the M.2 2230 for a solid-state drive with just seven screws and a single flick of a spudger than it is with the Deck.
I spend a few minutes of my time fighting with the Ally’s controls, as well as an average of 53 minutes of game time per charge when I do.
But turn on Turbo, and I was able to double the input resolution to 856 x 480 (which looks much better upscaled to 1080p) and push the frame rate well above 40 at all times. It was the difference between playing all three hours of The Last of Us: Left Behind in the kids bedroom and not playing this at all. I saw similar increases in both Elden Ring and Redfall.
I’m talking about smooth games for a computer as small as this one. In my tests, the magic of variable refresh rate (VRR) and low frame compensation (LFC) works right down to 30fps.
You’re waiting for a “but,” right? Before you give money for a product, you need to consider three things: 1) battery life; 2) glitch; and 3) how the windows operating system works. The experience on a handheld is not good.
In its April Fools’ Day announcement, Asus tried to have it both ways: the most powerful AMD Ryzen processor ever in a handheld but also the battery life to “never stop gaming again.” In briefings, the company showed off impressively smooth gameplay alongside claims that battery life would be comparable to the Steam Deck.
The good news is that the AMD Z1 Extreme chip at its heart is a big improvement over the previous-gen Ryzen 7 6800U, especially where lower wattages are concerned. Even if it’s mostly a rebranded laptop chip, the Z1 Extreme doesn’t suffer from the “needs more gas!” slowdown I experienced in my Ayaneo 2 review.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23719210/asus-rog-ally-review
The Last of Us Part I is a bit slow on the Steam Deck, but it still feels like it may be a few more frames per second
All values are average frames per second, save Elden Ring where I am measuring minimum frames per second in a particularly demanding part of the game.
The Last of Us Part I, one of the recent crop of disappointing PC ports, is one I’d consider unplayable on the Steam Deck. It isn’t much better on the performance mode than it was prior to; even with the fancy upscaling techniques, it doesn’t make any difference, the game is still playing at 30 frames per second.
