AyaNeo Air 1S/ AyaNeo 2S review - faster than Steam Deck but what about ROG Ally?
'Battery life be damned' mobile testing, gameplay and conclusions.
Before we talk gameplay, I thought I'd offer up a final brace of benchmarks, which you might call the 'battery life be damned' breakdown. In this scenario, we take the AyaNeo Air 1S, the Asus ROG Ally and the AyaNeo 2 and we run them at their maximum rated mobile power modes: 20W for the 1S, 25W for the Ally, 33W for the 2S. Perhaps you're wondering why we don't simply compare all devices at various power limits, but the truth is that 25W on the Ally may not be the same power delivery set-up as 25W on the AyaNeo devices.
With that said, the results fall into line with expectations. The more power you throw at these processors, the less additional return you get overall. Based on what we saw on the previous page, 22W looks like the sweet spot, while the 20W from the AyaNeo Air 1S also delivers decent results. Just bear in mind that in all cases, we'll be lucky to get over an hour of battery life from these devices. Anything above the sweet spot is best reserved for 'docked play', where you're plugged in and where the acoustics are more tolerable since you've got some distance between yourself and the hardware.
I've got to say that at 20W/22W, the AyaNeo devices seem to be less intrusive than the Steam Deck at 15W in terms of fan noise. Meanwhile, the ROG Ally was something of a revelation in this regard, right up to 25W when I first tested it. However, the latest firmware revisions tweak the fan curve and I actually found 25W to be quite loud. Perhaps this tweak is to address the much-reported issue where SD cards in the Ally were getting very, very hot indeed.
Forza Horizon 5, High, 4x MSAA
Cyberpunk 2077, Medium, TAA
Thus far, we've seen a lot of numbers, but a good bulk of the Digital Foundry video is about actually playing games on these 7840U-based devices. Now, in theory, with the numbers suggesting that the 7840U is much the same as the Z1 Extreme in the ROG Ally, we should expect the same experience, right? The fact that the AyaNeo devices ship with standard 60Hz screens while the ROG Ally has a 120Hz VRR panel makes all the difference.
With the ROG Ally, targeting 40fps upwards with consistent gameplay is very definitely doable on a range of titles and it looks good. With the AyaNeo devices, I felt my efforts were better spent targeting a locked 30fps or close to it, or attempt 60fps with minimal drops. For me, there's no middle ground.
Even so, I achieved some nice results playing on the AyaNeo Air 1S locked to 20W. Forza Horizon 5 can knock on the door of a locked 60fps on either medium or high settings at 720p. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on medium settings with high traffic density looks absolutely terrific and is essentially locked to 720p30. Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales? I plugged in PC optimised settings (sans RT), aimed for 1080p at 30fps using dynamic FSR 2 and it worked! 1080p is overkill, perhaps, but with 60fps off the table, maximising the return at 30fps paid off.
Remedy's Control was an interesting one. On console-equivalent settings (or as close as you can get - it's essentially low with medium reflections), many areas of the game run at 60fps, but there can be dips down to 40fps. This is a game that relatively speaking runs better on Steam Deck, perhaps owing to a more efficient driver implementation. I can play that game locked at 40fps with the screen in 40Hz mode on the same settings.
Other wins? The Last of Us Part 1 plays out just fine on medium settings at 30fps with a 900p output resolution and FSR 2 balanced upscaling. Decent frame-pacing is off the table with this game running at 30fps, but Kaldien's SpecialK toolkit gets the job done where Naughty Dog lets us down. Going for 900p with balanced FSR 2 vs 1080p with performance FSR 2 opens up an interesting discussion on the plus and minus points of standard upscale blur vs overly aggressive reconstruction artefacts.
Miles Morales aside, I found that the 900p option looks better overall for big screen play, and in the video you'll see my tests in A Plague Tale: Requiem, where there's a small performance boost for the 900p option that gives you a better fit to 30fps when the rodent hordes descend.
I could also play Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition with a very consistent performance level at high settings, normal RT, with 4x VRS. Full RT-based global illumination is heavy, requiring a 720p resolution with a 0.8 resolution scale, but seeing a terrific RT showcase play out in your hands on an OLED screen is something else.
Of course, we are talking about a power-limited handheld and there are no guarantees that every game you play will be a mini-masterpiece. The PC port of Returnal has become my go-to title to see whether it's anything more than a stuttering disaster, as has been the case on Steam Deck and ROG Ally. There seems to be some profound CPU limitations in place here, and as the 7840U is essentially the Z1 Extreme, it remains essentially unplayable - even on the lowest settings and with aggressive upscaling to 720p.
Wrapping up, the AyaNeo 2S is a large, high-quality handheld that thrives with the 7840U processor - but it's AyaNeo Air 1S that won my heart. It's a handheld PC that looks and feels like a classic portable, while the benefits of an AMOLED display are considerable. True, power is limited to 20W in battery play, but when diminishing returns kick in beyond that, it doesn't feel like such a big deal. The excellent acoustics at 20W help too in making the device more manageable.
Negative points? AyaNeo's haptics have historically been disappointing and the binary on/off buzzing that persists into the latest products is genuinely annoying to the point where I made it a priority to disable the effect in all games. This needs to be done in the game menus themselves as the AyaSpace options for doing this on a global level don't seem to work. The new AyaSpace software is a tremendous improvement over the old, but it was also disappointing to see that the frame-rate limiting options didn't do much for me.
All of which reminds me that while I love these handhelds and the gameplay experience they provide, ultimately they are still Windows portables and it's still an OS that does mobile play no favours whatsoever. I'm still finding that I need 'set-up' sessions plugged into a USB-C hub with keyboard, mouse and monitor to get things configured as I like them. It's par for the course with these devices, but annoying nonetheless.
Steam Deck, ROG Ally or AyaNeo? It's clear that there's no 'one size fits all' device that ticks all the boxes. The Deck is cheapest, works like a proper handheld and has the best battery life - at the cost of a mediocre screen and performance limitations. The ROG Ally is available in locales not served by AyaNeo retailers, has a 120Hz VRR screen with much utility and continued updates from Asus. AyaNeo? The Air 1S is beautifully crafted, surprisingly quiet, smaller than its competitors by some chalk and has an OLED screen! There's no outright winner here for portable PC play - but at least we have a bunch of great contenders.