Even though many thought it was just a joke, ASUS has announced they’re working on their handheld called the ROG Ally.
The newly announced ASUS ROG Ally looks like a very interesting handheld console that competes directly with the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck itself has seen immense success since it launched, mostly because it is the most competent handheld that you can buy outside of the Nintendo Switch. People who have huge Steam libraries were excited by the prospect of gaming on the go. But seeing some competition starting to pop up is good news since it will also lead to more innovation.
Some smaller companies have tried to compete with Valve in the handheld market, but nothing that truly compared to the Steam Deck. One of the most successful ones is the AyaNeo 2 which has some very competitive hardware packed in a very sleek package. But AMD is the first big company to announce their own handheld product, and we’re excited to see how this will pan out.
When it comes to specifications, the ROG Ally uses a 4nm Zen 4 chip and an RDNA 3 iGPU. These will offer a lot more computational power when directly compared to the Steam Deck. You can even combine the ROG Ally with AMD’s XG Mobile which lets you connect an external GPU. This means that you could potentially connect a 4090 to the ROG Ally, allowing you to play pretty much any game for the foreseeable future. As far as cooling goes, this handheld will use the proprietary ASUS “ROG Intelligent Cooling” which is also used in their Republic of Gamers line of laptops.
Similarly to the Steam Deck, the Ally also has a 7 inch screen, but with improved resolution. It has full 1080p compared to the 720p of the Steam Deck, as well as a refresh rate of 120Hz. If we are to listen to ASUS, the Ally will also be 25% brighter than the Steam Deck, but we’ll have to wait and see how truthful this statement is. As an added bonus, the Ally will run Windows 11, meaning you will have more freedom straight from the box. You can also install various other operating systems on the Steam Deck, but it will require a bit of work on your end.
There is no information on battery life yet, but the ROG Ally will be smaller than Valve’s offering. People who fell in love with the Steam Deck’s touchpads will be sad to hear that the ROG Ally will not feature any, instead going for a control scheme that is practically identical to the Nintendo Switch.
All of this is good news since the Switch is still operating on some very old hardware and the Steam Deck has encountered issues with certain titles. So the fact that we might be getting a real powerhouse handheld that can also be paired with an external GPU is exciting to say the least.
