Nicely, it’s confirmed: Asus really wasn’t joking when it mentioned it was making a handheld gaming PC on April Fools Day. The Asus ROG Ally is an AMD-powered handheld that appears set to tackle Valve’s Steam Deck – with some critically spectacular specs.
Asus claims that the AMD APU powering the ROG Ally is the quickest chip but, and packs help for connecting to Asus’ personal XG Mobile (opens in new tab) exterior GPU – letting you hook up an RTX 4090 for probably unbelievable efficiency.
The APU is a custom-designed 4nm Zen 4 chip with an RDNA 3 iGPU, which is virtually assured to ship superior efficiency to the Zen 2+/RDNA 2 APU discovered within the Steam Deck. It will possible make the XG Cell a bit redundant; why you’d want to attach a crazy-powerful $1,999 GPU, I can’t fathom. The ROG Ally will use the identical ‘ROG Clever Cooling’ present in Asus’s Republic of Avid gamers laptops.
The remainder of the specs look set to blow the Steam Deck away, too: the Ally shares the identical 7-inch display screen dimension, nevertheless it packs the next 1080p decision over the Deck’s 1280 x 800 and doubles the refresh fee at 120Hz. Asus additionally claims the utmost brightness is 25% higher than the Steam Deck’s. We additionally know (from the Canadian Asus website (opens in new tab), which unusually is the one area with any information on the Ally) that it’ll run Home windows 11.
We don’t know something about how the battery life will measure up but, however we do know that the ROG Ally will probably be a bit smaller and lighter than the Steam Deck, weighing in at 1.3 kilos (about 0.59kg). It doesn’t have the Deck’s fancy touchpad controls, as a substitute choosing a format that just about completely matches the Nintendo Change.
It’s actual!Keep tuned for extra 👀Wish to know when pre-orders begin?👉https://t.co/ljc2GNN0UU#ROG #ROGALLY #PlayALLYourGames pic.twitter.com/IG6vDtgTagApril 3, 2023
The Steam Deck is nice, nevertheless it’s time for one thing new
I’m massively completely happy to see this. Why? As a result of we’ve seen an entire bunch of Steam Deck imitators thus far – just like the stable AyaNeo 2 – however that is the primary product I’ve checked out and thought “that’s not an imitator – that’s a competitor”.
In actual fact, the ROG Ally could possibly be extra than simply that: it could possibly be the Steam Deck killer. Simply off the specs which have been revealed thus far (through a pair of movies from two YouTubers who got unique early entry), it ought to completely wreck the Deck in uncooked efficiency and graphical constancy.
I’m amped – for 2 causes. To begin with, as a result of I’m (hopefully) gonna be reviewing this dangerous boy, and I simply can’t wait to get my arms on it. However secondly, as a result of this may hopefully set a brand new bar for the efficiency of gaming handhelds – the Steam Deck is now greater than a yr previous, whereas the {hardware} powering the Nintendo Change is even older.
It’s time for brand new {hardware}! And AMD is proving that we don’t want costly discrete graphics playing cards: APUs may actually be the way forward for gaming, and that is the proving floor for that expertise. In brief, I’m hoping that Valve and Nintendo are taking notes.