ROG Ally: a Windows PC with a Screen – a Gamer’s Guide to Steam on Windows PCs and Xboxes
The ROG Ally is not really a Windows handheld gaming console, but a Windows PC built inside a large controller with a screen. This is terrible for everything, but it is great for game compatibility. The very first time I tried to launch the steam app from the armoury menu, it crashed because I didn’t have an internet connection, and there was a tiny Windows error box.
Most of the UI work is offloaded to Windows-based game stores, and of those only Steam is really prepared for a handheld interface. The default interface for the steam deck is the Big Picture mode, which can be used for everything from handhelds to TVs. Other stores like Xbox are just scaled down versions of their desktop app, but Steam is also what you will find on the Ally.
Max Payne 2 is not a Game That Feels Strange on a Seven-inch Wi-Fi Ignores a Windows Gamepad
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 made a lot of changes. I felt myself struggling against the form factor of the Ally. Once, while playing Doom Eternal, I was suddenly snapped out of the game to the Windows desktop, with a large black box filling half the screen. What reason did this interrupt happen? Your batteries are running low. Plug in your PC, you may want to.
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.
And yet… Windows still feels largely foreign on a seven-inch gamepad gadget. We know Microsoft is experimenting with a Windows gaming handheld mode, or at least it did in a September 2022 hackathon, but there’s nothing of the sort here. You have to hunt andpeck each single letter with a too-sensitive cursor on your right hand, or you can leave fingerprints on the touchscreen, because it’s impossible to type in a single letter using the left or D-pad.
Max Payne 2 is not a game that runs well on the Ally and the Steam Deck. 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 and still without atrigger or a precision aim, since there was no gyro and no easily-customized sensitivity.
The first time I launched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on the ROG Ally, 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. 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 launched it on the Deck, it just worked. Difficult torender fog and all were present in the 2003 Windows game. It loaded a community controller profile that bound my buttons as I remember them 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 just dropped the files into my Linux game folder with no modification and it worked right away.
A wake-up call for Microsoft? Considering the limitations of the ROG Ally gaming system with an external battery and a user interface
I fundamentally believe a portable gaming PC isn’t truly portable if the battery life and user interface aren’t built for the road. I think most people are better off buying a favorite gaming laptop rather than this machine, because it would cost $300 more. If you want a portable, add your own small disk and save a few hundred dollars by buying a $400 steam deck.
Sean Hollister had mixed feelings about the ROG Ally as it is a powerful device with a lack of battery, which is its biggest fault. The Ally has some definite advantages over the Steam Deck, with a more powerful processor, higher refresh screen, and much quieter operation. It’s a full-feature computer that can be purchased for $700 and occasionally used as a desktop computer with a mouse, keyboard, and external monitor if you choose. If you think you’re willing to work with some short battery life and buggy behavior — and you want something more powerful than a Steam Deck with native support for Xbox Game Pass (personally, the thing I most sorely miss when I play my own Steam Deck) — you can take a chance on the ROG Ally.
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. There has been a long and troubled history of the company supporting games on Windows, and it always comes down to Xbox being a separate division with conflicting incentives. Microsoft is working on a new interface for handheld devices, but so far none of the other players has heard of it.
The Steam Deck vs. the ROG Ally: What Do Gamers Really Want to Know About Microsoft and SteamOS? Commentary on Asus
If the stopgap solution is called Steam, I don’t know what to think. 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 if the company will continue to offer full support of SteamOS or if it will be limited to support eGPUs.
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.
It’s not rocket science: Both the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally have the same battery capacity of 40 watt-hours. They can run at 40 watt per hour or 20 watt per hour for two hours and 10 watt per hour for four hours. Except that, with the ROG Ally, four hours looks like the best you can bargain for. The best-case scenario is closer to seven with the steam deck.
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.
Perhaps most importantly, there’s no Xbox button 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. At some point in the future, we will have the option of assigning the main Xbox game pad button to different buttons on the ROG Ally, says a spokesman for the company.
The placement of your thumbs on this device isn’t optimal for the split keyboard. It’s not easy to scroll websites and documents by joystick, and it may take a bit longer than on a steam deck. The half-height taskbar that saves space on the Ally’s screen is the most obvious improvement, but it often shows up on my desktop monitor as an empty space in the center of the screen. 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.
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 for the first time on the Ally, I was greeted with a process that was impossible to end-Task. The head of Xbox devices, Roanne Sones, is speaking at Asus’ launch event; Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer talked up the Ally on a podcast. Microsoft made a special exception for this particular seven-inch display so they could certify Windows 11.
The Verge Doesn’t Review Gadgets On Potential. The Role of Robots, Controls, and Armoury Crate
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 examine what can be seen and touched.
The other thing Krohn says won’t ship to consumers is the current version of Armoury Crate, which is good because it tends to hang and / or crash on my review unit — at which point many of my gamepad controls stop working. I had to walk and look around after all of a sudden when I was playing Control this Tuesday. 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.
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.
The buttons have a pleasant springy return, but it takes a bit of time for them to get used to. 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. I was unable to shoot or jump in the game because it was a game where split-second reactions were 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. Asus graciously sent me a second unit, and it had the same issue.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23719210/asus-rog-ally-review
Rog-Always Review: Boosting the frame rate of Elden Ring, Redfall, and The Last of Us with Turbo and Low Frame Compensation
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.
It’s just a shame I’m averaging 53 minutes of gameplay per charge when I do — and that I generally spend a few of those minutes fighting with the ROG Ally’s controls.
I was able to double the input resolution to 856 x 480 and push the frame rate above 40 at times with the help of the Turbo feature on my computer. It was the difference between “I would absolutely not play this” and “I played through all three hours of The Last of Us: Left Behind in the kids’ bedroom.” 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.
You’re waiting for a “but,” right? Here are three to consider before you put down preorder cash today: 1) battery life; 2) glitches; and 3) how the Windows operating system — supposedly a plus! — hamstrings the handheld experience.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23719210/asus-rog-ally-review
Ayaneo 2 on the AMD Z1 Extreme: Slaying the Spire, The Last of Us, and Best Buy: An Algorithm for Newcomers at Best Buy
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.
One of the recent disappointing PC ports is The Last of Us Part I, and it is not worth playing 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.
As for the base model with a standard AMD Z1, that’s not expected until the third quarter of 2023 — though it will also be sold at Best Buy, which for now, is the exclusive Ally retailer. Is Best Buy an Ally ally?
If we waited, the early bugs will get solved a bit and we will be able to see 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.