April Fool’s Day! The success of the Steam Deck is bringing fresh competition onto the scene, as ASUS is now launching its own PC handheld, the ROG Ally, to grab market share from Valve.
PC gamers didn’t look bad when, on April 1st of all days, ASUS announced the ROG Ally – a handheld designed to take on Valve’s Steam Deck. What started as an alleged April Fool’s joke is now turning out to be reality! So Valve has to deal with new competition.
ASUS and ROG have now confirmed that the planned console actually exists; this can already be pre-ordered at Best Buy under the name ROG Ally. There are also a few selected journalists who have already had the opportunity to take a closer look at the hardware. Dave2D draws a very positive conclusion and admits that the ROG Ally is, above all, significantly more powerful than the Steam Deck.
According to Dave2D, the claim that the ROG Ally delivers twice the performance of the Steam Deck can be largely confirmed. The screen has a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, but the Steam Deck sometimes struggles to reach 50Hz or 60Hz. Gamers would therefore have to choose lower resolutions there in order to achieve maximum performance.
According to the journalist, such compromises are not necessary with the Ally. The specially adapted Ryzen AMD chip should ensure this. The ROG Ally’s display, meanwhile, has a 1080p resolution versus the Steam Deck’s 800p; the 16:9 format also feels natural.
In order to reduce the size of the handheld, ASUS decided to do without a touchpad like the Steam Deck. Another big difference is the implementation of Windows 11 and ASUS’ own Armory Crate software; As is well known, Steam relies on its own OS.
However, the tester is still silent on what the battery life looks like. The final specifications or pricing are also still unknown, as is local availability. We will keep you up to date!
