The review was about handheld gaming with a limited lifespan
The Ally Steam Deck: Bringing all PC games to a handheld via a new partnership between Steam and Icing.io
Ever since the Nintendo Switch arrived in 2017, it’s been plausible to dream about carrying your entire gaming library with you. Valve’s Steam Deck comes the closest—after a buggy start, it’s become a surprisingly impressive piece of hardware. The ROG Ally promises to bring every PC game to a handheld, as part of a new partnership between the two companies.
The only Windows-based game stores that are prepared for a handheld interface are the ones on Steam and itch.io. The default interface for the Steam Deck is Big Picture mode, which can be used for everything from handhelds to TVs. When launching the Ally version of Steam you will find scaled-down versions of their desktop app, as well as the other stores.
Max Payne 2 doesn’t work properly on the Ally, nor does it run on the Steam Deck or the ROG Ally? Is it really that hard?
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 popped up constantly. I felt I was having a hard time against the Ally. While playing Doom Eternal, I was suddenly removed from the game to the Windows desktop, with a large black box filling 50% of the screen. What made it necessary for an interruption? Your battery is low. You might want to plug in your PC.”
Connecting to Wi-Fi, I found a UI problem that gave me a bad premonition of things to come: The onscreen keyboard I needed to enter my (rather long) Wi-Fi password covered half the password box. It was difficult to register several letters. To correct those mistakes, I had to hold down the “Show password” icon while stretching my fingers to tap the onscreen arrow keys.
Yes, it’s much easier to install the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, the EA app, GOG, Genshin Impact, and a variety of anti-cheat-enabled games on a Windows handheld, without all of the workarounds you’d need on the Deck. Game pads work great. But without gyro aiming, community-built controller profiles and a decade of compatibility work, games for mouse and keyboard are not being left behind by Microsoft and Asus.
Max Payne 2 is a game that doesn’t run properly on the Steam Deck, but it doesn’t run properly on the Ally, either. The entire game is built around avoiding bullets and I couldn’t pull the gun on me while using the Joystick. The default keyboard bindings do not make sense in other ways, including binding Escape to the B button, which is used to summon the View and Menu buttons in XInput games. stay completely unbound. I had to change most of the controls, but still didn’t have atrigger or any form of precision aim because I didn’t have a good set of controls.
I launched Prince of Persia on the ROG Ally and it crashed. Then it crashed again when I tried to access the graphical settings and again when it tried to load part of the first level of the game, sometimes throwing strange error messages. I had to download a patch to make it work. There were no ways to land a sword combo, crouch or drop to a lower ledge and no way to stab with the Dagger of Time without remapping all of my controls.
The first time I launched it on the Deck, it just worked. The 2003 Windows game ran in Linux, tricky-to-render fog and all. It loaded the community controller profile that bound my buttons the same way I remembered on the PS2. The right joystick swung the camera a little too quickly, but I fixed that in 10 seconds by summoning the controller configurator and turning down the joystick sensitivity. And that widescreen Windows patch? I put the same files in my game folder on Linux, and they worked right away.
The ROG Ally: A Wake-Up Call for Microsoft and How to Prevent a Breakdown from a Mobile Device with a Ultraportable User Interface
I don’t think a portable gaming PC is truly portable if it can’t get the same battery life and user interface on 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, maybe save a couple hundred bucks by buying a $400 Steam Deck and adding your own small SSD.
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. You can play any speed you want to maximize your battery, play games the Steam Deck can’t run, or even get a little extra speed by plugging in the 65- watt power cord. There is a special port with 8PCI-Express lanes so you can plug in an external graphics card.
I think 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. Even though the company has a long and troublesome history supporting games on Windows, it always comes down to Xbox being a separate division with conflicting incentives. As far as Microsoft actually building that new UI for handheld devices, Krohn says he hasn’t heard anything more than I have.
The Asus ROG Ally: Windows vs. Windows Big Picture or Dual-Boat SteamOS? Is Windows the stopgap solution?
I am not sure if the stopgap solution is Steam. Maybe the Ally should default to Steam Big Picture or maybe even run SteamOS 3.0 instead of Windows when Valve makes it broadly available. I don’t know how much of a presence it will have with steamOS or whether it will fully support eGPUs.
While Windows is a blessing and a curse, it is exciting to see the handheld PC gaming arena grow thanks to the Asus ROG Ally and other mainstream competitors. Preorders for a higher-end version of the Ally with anGHz Z1 Extreme processor are currently available at Best Buy and will be released on June 13th.
I didn’t have time to wipe and debloat the Ally and run it as a steam big picture or dual-bootSteamOS handheld, but I would like to see if that makes a difference for a future story. It could be that the battery life deficit has less to do with components and more to do with Windows.
When we asked Asus “why Windows?” the answer was basically that it’s what gamers want because gamers shouldn’t have to leave any of their games behind.
There is no button for Xbox on this PC. Whether you’re playing on Steam or Xbox Game Pass or simply using Microsoft’s own Xbox Game Bar, the gamepad controls are incomplete, without an easy way to summon the controls that both Valve and Microsoft encourage you to use to launch, chat, and multitask in an Xbox gaming environment. Asus spokesperson Ester Suh says that the company “will have the option to assign the main Xbox gamepad button to different buttons on the ROG Ally” at some point in the future.
The split touchscreen keyboard isn’t optimized for the places your thumbs will naturally be when holding this device. It doesn’t work like it does on a Steam Deck, where you scroll websites and documents smoothly, but in fits and starts. 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. It is simpler to navigate by a touch screen in Windows 11 compared to previous versions, but I do not want to touch my screen when the joysticks are nearby.
You should understand that Microsoft is a partner for the ROG Ally — and not just in the “it runs Windows 11” sense. The ROG Ally comes preloaded with Xbox Game Pass and includes a free six-month subscription to the Ultimate tier. When I opened a website on the Ally for the first time, the process that Microsoft Edge uses to get you to open a website was unskippable and cannot-End-Task. The head of XBOX devices, Roanne Sones, is speaking at the launch event of Asus, while Phil Spencer talked about the Ally on a podcasts. Microsoft helped with changes to the screen and made a special exception to certify Windows 11 for it.
The Asus ROG: A rogally-review unit that doesn’t ship to consumers, but does ship in the real world
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 the things we can see and touch.
The current version of Armoury Crate will be hard to ship to consumers because it will hang and crash on my review unit, which is one of the reasons it won’t ship. I was playing Control and suddenly, I couldn’t do anything except walk and look around. The entire service crashed, so I couldn’t access the controller configurator to check what had happened, or switch my controls between gamepad anddesktop modes. It took a full reboot to bring my controls back.
Asus ROG technical marketing director Sascha Krohn tells The Verge that no consumer should ever see this problem — it was already caught ahead of production, and retail units will ship with slightly larger keys that can’t move around as much and won’t get caught underneath.
If you’re after a firm press, a smooth return, and plenty of purchase, the flatABXY buttons are for you. But when I started hammering on them in some friendly rounds of Duck Game, three of them kept getting stuck… again and again and again. All of a sudden, I couldn’t shoot or jump in a game where split-second reactions are everything. It’s because the keycaps can slightly tilt when you push them at an angle, and their edges can get stuck underneath the frame. I was graciously sent a second unit by Asus, and it had the same issue.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23719210/asus-rog-ally-review
Boosting the performance of an all-power, low-power M.2 2230 drive with a single flick of the spudger
Also, it takes just seven easy-to-remove Phillips-head screws and a single flick of a spudger to swap the M.2 2230 solid-state drive — quite a bit easier than the Deck.
I got 50 percent in 40 minutes with the Ally and it was quicker to charge. (It takes maybe 30 minutes if you leave it alone.) It can take a couple of hours to fill the system with the bundled charge, but it will be enough if you play games in Turbo mode.
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. I played through all three hours of The Last of Us: Left Behind in the kids’ bedroom, not the one where I would absolutely not play this. I saw similar boosts in Elden Ring and Redfall, too.
Seriously, it’s so smooth for a computer this small, and I’m not just talking about games that run at 120Hz. In my tests, the magic of variable refresh rate (VRR) and low frame compensation (LFC) works right down to 30fps.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23719210/asus-rog-ally-review
Last of Us, Part II: Low-wattage Ayaneo 2 with a Ryzen 7 6800U on an AMD Z1 Extreme
You’re waiting for a “but,” right? You should consider battery life, glitch, and the Windows operating system before shelling out money for pre-orders today. hamstrings the handheld experience.
I did manage to sip just 9.8 watts in Slay the Spire, but that’s playing a 2D game with largely static images and every battery-saving measure turned on, including the lowest possible processor wattage, limited to 30fps, while playing at the minimum screen brightness in a dark room. And yet, my Ally actually turned itself off at three hours, 38 minutes, not four-plus hours, perhaps because Asus’ battery always seems to drain more quickly when it’s nearing its end.
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!” I experienced a slow down during my Ayaneo 2 review.
All values are average frames per second at 720p low, save Elden Ring where I’m measuring minimum frames per second in a particularly demanding part of the game.
I would consider the Last of Us Part I an unplayable port on the Steam Deck. It’s not much better on the ROG Ally’s Performance mode, even with fancy upscaling techniques like AMD FSR 2.0; I might as well have been playing a mosaic at 432 x 240 resolution uprezzed to 1080p and still saw the game dip below 30fps as soon as a single enemy got close.
Best Buy versus Ally: The Z1 Base Model at Best Buy and Its Ally At The Grand Unified Next-to-Leading Order
The base model with a standard Z1 will not be available in Best Buy until the third quarter of 2023, though it will also be sold at Ally. That makes Best Buy an Ally ally?
Though, maybe if we wait, the early bugs may get ironed out a little, and we’ll even one day see some deals and discounts to make the ROG Ally more appealing. Remember, even the Steam Deck got a 10 percent discount once — it just, you know, took a whole year.
