The Steam Deck is a smooth, polished, well-thought-out experience that just works. Two devices with two vastly different experiences. My time with this and the Steam Deck has also made me realise that we’re watching a new battle bloom between two potential future greats of the handheld gaming scene. I’ve talked almost exclusively about performance for a reason, that really is the standout feature of the Asus ROG Ally. The Steam Deck and Ally Rog side by side. Valve’s machine has the kind of consumer support that should be included when comparing the two devices outside of raw performance data. Head over to Etsy, search "Steam Deck", and you will see the enthusiasm and creativity of that community. There’s also a very active community of hardware modders-who mainly gather in the r/steamdeck Reddit sub-who 3D print and sell mounts for your portable batteries. I’m less confident about the Ally’s ability to do this. Like I said, I have raced through my backlog at home, on trains and planes without ever being fully caught short. I was getting more than two hours of Doom Eternal at 60fps, high settings and limiting TDP. I have played simpler titles, like Next Machina and Super Monkey Ball, for up to four hours on the Deck with optimised settings. It appears to be more power efficient with less demanding games. The Steam Deck really comes out on top here. As new devices come out from competitors, and from Valve, this will become a more common issue - if you can even call it that. This has been less the case on the Steam Deck because its performance ceiling isn’t as high as the Asus machine. Switching between the best graphics, or battery saving graphics, is a new problem created by a new category of consoles. But once they have a game working, that’s usually it. Console gamers aren’t used to tweaking settings to get games to work. It’s a huge first world problem, but also an interesting one. But if I’m travelling and I have to drop settings to conserve power, the downgrade is a bitter pill to swallow because I know what the device is capable of. At home it’s a trade-off I’m happy to make because I’m close to a charger or I play plugged in. Without a major technological leap in battery technology this was always going to be the case. I will get two out of the Deck, but it doesn’t look as good. For those AAA games, I get less than an hour of playing time before reaching for the charger. Even in performance mode at a higher resolution you will see that battery drain rapidly. That 1080p, 120Hz display eats power, as does turbo mode. But I have come to realise that the Ally's greatest feature could also be a poisoned chalice. For this reason, and this reason alone, the Asus ROG Ally has comfortably benched my Steam Deck and PS5 for the last two weeks. It became a game itself to see what titles could run smoothly and at what settings, with the Ally handling almost everything thrown at it. The options of higher resolution and a faster refresh rate also vastly improve the experience across all games on the Ally. The difference between the two is at the top end of the gaming pyramid. It doesn’t run on the Steam Deck at all.įor less intensive games like Hades, or Nex Machina-or even older AAA games-you can max out the settings on both devices without performance issues. The PC enhanced edition of Metro Exodus runs, but you will need to be plugged in for it to play and you will struggle to keep 30fps in turbo mode. I found similar results with other demanding games like Horizon Zero Dawn, which hit highs of 70fps at 720p on the Ally in Turbo mode at medium settings, or a solid 50fps on performance mode with the same setup. That isn’t slight on Valve’s tech, this is a next-gen game, so it shouldn’t really run on a handheld device at all, which makes it impressive that the Ally can do it so well. If you ask for much more the fan will angrily huff and it visually turns into a flipbook animation. The Steam Deck will hover around 30fps at medium settings (and frequently dip below in action areas). Performance mode at 720p comfortably hit 30fps on the high settings, but push it to 1080p and you will get something closer to what you see on Valve’s device. Maxing out the settings for the criminally underrated Quantum Break has been a lot of fun.
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