Asus ROG Ally vs Steam Deck: can powerful new tech deliver a game-changing handheld?

It's extremely rare for a company to come to market with a brand new type of product that knocks it out of the park on its first attempt - and certainly developing a new handheld is exceptionally difficult, as the folks at Valve will tell us. Asus has arrived in the handheld market putting its best foot forward in a number of regards: it has identified areas of weakness with the Steam Deck and addressed them with a hardware package that is remarkably good. The 1080p 120Hz VRR display is a gigantic improvement over the Deck's lacklustre panel, the form factor is smaller and the cooling assembly is first class.

The Z1 Extreme chip is certainly capable but based on the results over the last couple of pages, it's pretty clear why Valve is ruling out any second-gen Deck with performance improvements. The cost for an actually game-changing boost to frame-rates is too high. The Ally's 15W showing is nowhere near the 50 percent improvement over Deck mooted during pre-launch marketing and bigger boosts over the Deck are thin on the ground. Battery life at 15W is similar to the Deck when frame-rates are unlocked, but the strategies used for reclaiming game time on the Deck don't seem to work as well as they do on the Valve handheld, suggesting efficiency concerns or power management challenges or maybe just limitations inherent to the Windows OS that Asus has wedded itself to.

Similar to the Ryzen 7 6800U handhelds out there, the Z1 Extreme comes into its own when given a lot more power - it's here with 40 to 60 percent gains are delivered vs the Deck and its to the Ally's credit that the machine remains so quiet bearing in mind that circa 20W more power is being thrust through the system. However, that's problematic in other ways: with power consumption in the 45W area, you're looking at just 50 minutes of play with the system - which simply isn't viable for a handheld gaming system unless you game close to the mains.

Efficiencies are limited then, and I was also puzzled at just how little performance there is when the Ally is set to its 9W silent mode. Now, I'm not expecting to be playing the most demanding triple-A experiences on 9W, but older titles are certainly a viable use-case scenario, so I benched Far Cry 2 at 9W and 15W on Ally and Deck. The results are quite extraordinary: the Deck delivers 48 percent more performance at 9W than the Ally does. Returning both machines to the default 15W, Ally pulls away with a 23 percentage point lead, which makes a lot more sense.

I've had some great times with the Ally over the last couple of weeks, but there's the sense that the product is still firmly in beta status and that there are many, many issues that still need to be addressed. The Asus Armoury Crate works OK, but you don't have the full functionality of the various game launchers out there and I often found myself attaching a USB-C hub with keyboard and mouse just to get things done or set-up to my liking.

The Command Centre is an excellent idea, but again, there are issues: sometimes the response drops away, resulting in remarkable lag. The frame-rate limiter seems to act in a purely advisory capacity, if it acts at all. The ways in which it switches between controller modes isn't bullet-proof either, meaning you're not always guaranteed for the controls to work out of the gate.

Asus ROG Ally Review vs Steam Deck: The Fastest PC Handheld... But Is It The Best?

There've been complaints in several reviews about the 'stickiness' of the face buttons, but I didn't have much of a problem with them at all. We're not talking Xbox Elite Controller quality, but they did the job for me just fine. However, I was dismayed that the right trigger was totally non-functional in A Plague Tale: Requiem, meaning that Amicia's sling couldn't be used, meaning no further progress through the game without the use of external controllers. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the trigger generally, as it worked just fine in other titles.

Various issues - including the lack of performance in 15W mode when plugged in (which Asus says is fixed in a BIOS update) - conspire to lend the impression that the ROG Ally isn't fully baked quite yet, while the Windows underpinnings may well be a limiting factor that may never be overcome. With that said, I can see various aspects that may tempt prospective buyers away from the Deck: the screen, the noise and the limitations in performance. The ROG Ally provides the answers to all of those issues and while Windows may not be much fun for a gaming handheld, the ability to hook it into a hub and use it as a pretty effective portable PC may also have much appeal.

Ultimately though, as a gaming handheld, efficiency, battery life and a bug-free experience are crucial to the experience - and in these all-important regards, the Asus ROG Ally still needs a lot of work.

Asus ROG Ally vs Steam Deck Review

• Introduction, hardware, specs
• Software, power modes, battery life
• Game benchmarks: Control, Forza Horizon 5, God of War
• Game benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Returnal, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Great specs and performance, poor battery life and bugs: the Digital Foundry verdict [This Page]