AyaNeo Air / AyaNeo Air Pro Review vs Steam Deck: An OLED Handheld Masterpiece?

a full pc in the palm of your hand steam deck brought the concept into the mainstream but plenty of manufacturers got there first and new products continue to hit the market what you're looking at here the iron neo air is one of the most intriguing i mean what's not to like about the steam deck to begin with well uh the screen for starters the bulk of it that's also problematic but the iron eo air ships with a beautiful 5.5 inch oled display which is undoubtedly leaps and bounds beyond valve's mediocre lcd the form factor here it's actually brilliant think of it as a full pc packed into the same kind of package as the switch light it's kind of irresistible so the thing here is that there are actually two ineo airs available the vanilla version is the thinner and lighter variant the pro looks much the same but is significantly deeper in order to accommodate a larger bat fee and battery life as we shall discover is a real problem on the standard edition but what both have in common are the same basic aesthetics the same excellent analog sticks and face buttons the same lovely display the same sd card reader shouldered figures i think these are perhaps a little spongy for my tastes while the shoulder buttons feel a little bit insubstantial but overall this machine really is a lovely piece of kit oh and um usbc connectors top and bottom both capable of charging that's a nice touch certainly something i'd have liked to have seen on the deck but really this machine is all about the experience so to see modern games running on this system actually scratch that to see a range of pc games across the ages running on a portable system like this with an oled display really is very impressive let's talk specs unlike steam deck the os of choice for the iron eo air is windows 11 and beating at the heart of the system typically is the ryzen 5 5560u or for the higher end versions of the pro model the ryzen 7 58 25u essentially it's the same chip except that the ryzen 5 only has six of the eight available cpu cores available along with six of the eight available radeon vega compute units active on the gpu side it's actually a bewildering amount of different spec variations available but when choosing an ir neo unit my advice would be to not choose the cheapest one with the slowest memory and indeed only eight gigs of it get a 16 gigabyte unit with lp ddr4 x 4266 you'll need the extra ram and the first order of business with any amd apu is to not starve it of memory bandwidth so yeah the faster the memory the better the choice also becomes easier when looking at batteries you only get a 28 watt hour battery for the standard model which rises to 38 watt hours on the pro so yes that means it's thicker but with the system running at full pelt the smaller bat feed gives most 90 minutes of battery life in more demanding titles and sometimes just over an hour simple maths will tell you that the 38 watt hour battery gives you around 36 more battery life so we're looking at a machine that's based on windows 11. so let's be clear it's not the most intuitive interface for a handheld and there's going to be a lot more configuration required compared to steam deck and uh yeah there's a lot less handholding from the operating system itself so that being the case i'd recommend a usbc hub for keyboard and mouse inputs on the setup procedure to make things easier getting all of your launchers and games installed io itself has its iospace app that acts as an uber launcher of sorts giving you access to all installed games it's also where you can change controller configurations and most crucially of all in performance terms adjusting the power limit for the ryzen processor 8 watt and 12 watt are the preferred balance and game options however the standard air can be taken up to 15 watts already limited battery life be damned go for it while the pro can be pushed further to 18 watts not so onerous considering the larger bat fee the higher the power limit the less battery life you'll have though obviously but also the harder the cooling assembly needs to work and the machine can get rather warm if not hot to the touch at higher wattages also make sure you check out the arrangement for airflow the inlet is on the back the exhaust at the top similar to steam deck you need to have the machine on to download games so i'd recommend not leaving the handheld on your desk while this happens as it blocks off airflow and the system can rapidly heat up less of a problem on the deck because the grips can give it some height there in terms of actual applications for the various tdps the 8 watt balance mode is only really useful for older or less demanding games so for example 8 watt mode works perfectly well for playing something like cuphead which runs flat out at 60 frames per second and looks stunning on the oled screen but for any modern game you're essentially looking at a slideshow with the constricted power limit 12 watts that's really where you want to be on the non-pro model and actually ideally you should be at 15 watts the main problem being big big battery life problems on that vanilla model curiously an earlier version of ios space seemed to let me hit 20 watts on the standard air which dramatically improved spider-man remastered stability but essentially it took battery life down to less than one hour and man the machine got really hot this is another reason i favor the pro model even if you opt for one without the enhanced ryzen 7 processor the fact is that the bigger bat fee makes accessing those higher power limits more comfortable in terms of your overall battery life the fact you're running on windows 11 also means that you're going to be missing a lot of really good features steam deck has out of the box such as a properly frame paced 30fps limiter and configurable screen refresh frequencies both of which can help tremendously with battery life and fluidity of in-game performance so yeah his control running on the ryzen 5 at 12 watts 720p low settings which are actually very close to ps4 and xbox one quality levels the unlocked frame rate doesn't look great and essentially with no decent 30 fps cap i'm paying for much of the stutter with extra battery drain compare and contrast with forza horizon 5 at 720p medium again at 12 watts which does have an internal 30 fps limiter that does have consistent frame pacing a smoother ride all around better performance and the ryzen processor won't always be running totally flat out conserving a bit of battery life for you so the elephant in the room here is the steam deck obviously which solves a lot of problems for the user in terms of the basic interface and the user experience but the real differentiating factor is the gpu architecture steamdex apu has only four cpu processor cores compared to the six or eight of the neo and while it has the same eight compute units as the ryzen 7 equipped neo pro it's on a completely different architecture the rdna 2 gpu offers game-changing performance increases for the same limited power budget remarkable so with that in mind let's dig into performance we shouldn't expect steam deck like frame rates for sure but we should talk about the various power profiles and the impact that has on frame rates and on top of that we should be factoring in the ir neo air pro as well so question there does the extra couple of compute units help or is the power ceiling just too severe to make too much of a difference and yeah i don't think we can make any kind of performance comparison without including steam deck benched here on windows 10 on the same settings couldn't use windows 11 it's not compatible with the deck yet here we shall discover just how much more efficient rdna 2 is compared to vega but more than that the deck's popularity ensures that it is the device that developers will be targeting for portable play on their pc titles assuming that they are considering portable play at all of course let's start by looking at the basic iron eo air with the ryzen 5 5560u control here looks pretty good on the air but this highlights a key limitation with any benchmark really they can never really be representative of the full game experience and this is a less busy scene regardless scaling from 8 watts to 12 watts a 50 increase in power yields 47 extra performance rising to 69 from 8 watts to 15 watts which is an 88 increase in power consumption in truth in standard game you really need 15 watts to stay above 30 fps quick look at death stranding here virtually a slideshow 8 watts as you might imagine but nyon perfect power scaling to 12 watts 50 percent more power for 50 percent more performance a 69 boost moving to 15 watts but we're still under 30 fps often here on default settings and the only real way to increase performance is by lowering resolution or using upscaling forza horizon 5 next and a very good showing here i'd say from the iron eo air with 720p medium delivering an average 33 fps at 12 watts even though the performance increase from 8 watts to 12 is a less than stellar 33 with that extra 50 percent of power if you're looking for that extra 50 in performance you'll have to move up to the 15 watt setting we'll be looking at actual gameplay here in a bit but 12 watts delivers a good experience during actual gameplay and just generally i like this benchmark sequence here as it's an actual stress test from gameplay conditions performance bumps from your extra wattage also similarly subpar here in shadow of the tomb raider benched here at 720p medium this is a demanding game and the iron eo here can't deliver an average 30 fps on any of the power brackets rounding off the tests this marvel spider-man remastered sequence returns us to stellar scaling in line with the extra power but having played the game you'll need dynamic resolution scaling and at least 15 watts to get close to a stable experience with a 30 fps cap so the obvious takeaway is that the 8 watt setting is going to be off the table for running modern games and it's the 12 watt and 15 watt tdps we should be looking at which raises the question of how the ir neo air pro with its optional ryzen 75825u changes the landscape two extra cpu cores two extra vega compute units bigger battery sounds beefier on paper but what's the actual reality here in terms of performance numbers truth is that with a pretty brutal power limit in place the ability to scale is limited control first across the duration of the benchmark those extra resources get you less than two percent of extra performance at 12 watts ryzen 5 versus ryzen 7. 15 watt to 15 what though an extra 6 percent there's a more impressive bump with death stranding an extra 10 percent of performance at 12 watts and about 7 at 15 watts forza horizon 5 also saw a better rise at the lower power level a 7 bump at 12 watts versus just 3 at 15 watts shadow the tomb raider gives a control-like outlook a meager 2 increase at 12 watts comparing the two processors versus around seven percent at 15 watts finally marvel's spider-man sees an eight percent boost of frame rates at 12 watts with the more capable chip dropping to six percent at 15 watts it's worth pointing out that the pro can also be run at 18 watts and of course it does have that larger battery so there are further options there ultimately though a notional 33 increase in potential gpu compute performance does not scale in a linear way whatsoever you're getting the bulk of the performance from the ryzen 5. however the extra battery power at least makes the higher power options more viable the 28 watt hour battery in the basic air is brutally limited so yeah i still think the pro is definitely more preferable here because you can run the pro at 15 watts versus the air at 12 watts and there's an appreciable improvement to performance and you'll still have superior battery life in my experience in actually playing games on the air as opposed to just benchmarking i did get the sense that i was hitting performance limitations that would likely require running at a lower resolution than 720p the last recourse in hitting frame rates i would actually like to experience during gameplay it's a feeling i rarely experience on steam deck and when we run the same benches again with all devices at 15 watts well the incredible increase in performance from the same wattage kind of speaks for itself our dna ii really is quite monstrous here in control the six percent improvement in frame rates moving from air to pro becomes an incredible 56 percent when comparing air to steam deck death stranding it's kind of revelatory to be honest air to pro 7 uplift air to steam deck 66.2 but the numbers aren't actually the real story here it's that vega graphics experiences tremendous stuttering traversal which simply isn't there on steam deck the boost isn't so pronounced in marvel spider-man another six percent uplift comparing air to pro on the vega architecture but we're still getting a big big 44 increase moving from the air to steam deck i want to highlight this section at the end of the spidey bench though as we swing into the city there's a point where performance across all three devices basically converges i think at this point the cpu and gpu are vying for resources here depressing performance and of course while rdna2 graphics is clearly a ton faster there are issues to highlight forza horizon 5 obviously faster on steam deck to the tune of around 42 percent versus the standard air however we do seem to be hitting cpu limitations which are hurting overall frame health shadow of the tomb raider again it's obviously faster 54 faster than the vanilla air actually but still there are lurching stutters on the deck that aren't there on either of the iron eos my guess is that we're hitting a cpu ceiling on deck in certain scenarios whereas the air and the pro are still gpu limited there so valve's decision to go for a quad-core cpu cluster does result in diminished performance in some limited scenarios and it's not going to affect every game where the gpu ceiling is prevalent but stats offered up by forza and tomb raider benchmarks show some interesting results both of these benchmarks highlight the performance level of the cpu in processing game logic and render logic the game simulation and the time taken to prepare commands for the gpu forza horizon 5 shows fairly consistent averages in processing gain logic but the more cpu cores available the higher the lowest frame rates meanwhile on the rendering side there's a clear pecking order in performance moving from deck at the lowest with the fewest cpu cores to air in the middle to pro at the top though lowest frame rates are similar between air and deck shadow of the tomb raider is more illuminating in terms of game logic average frame rates on the air and the pro are significantly faster than the steam deck and the lowest frame rate is correspondingly lower on deck 2. looking at the game logic side of things more of a gap opens up between the three cpu clusters though it's clear that steam deck is considerably slower as i said most of these results don't impact much of the actual game because the gpu is the primary limitation but certainly in the case of the shadow of the tomb raider benchmark we have good data here on why we're getting stutters on steam deck that we aren't getting on the ineo handhelds let's talk about gameplay experiences the ryzen 5 with a 12 watt power limit was the primary configuration i used for testing and it's a mixed bag on modern games to be honest aya talks about modern titles running at 720p at 30 frames per second on low settings but this is a very broad generalization that doesn't really make sense because one modern game at low settings could have a much higher performance footprint than another that is perhaps running at high settings looking at controlled on low settings at 720p 12w pretty much as far as you'd want to go with a standard air performance isn't particularly impressive and can drop under 30 frames per second in taxing scenes on higher settings with a screen refresh of 40 hertz i can run this game locked at 40 frames per second on steam deck big big golf there marvel spider-man at 12 watts with dynamic res on and we got medium low settings here internal 30 fps cap active it's not really that great with a lot of dropped frames particularly in city traversal even with drs fully active yes i guess i could drop settings further but then we'd be stripping so much out that not even the novelty of the oled screen is going to make up for it forza horizon 5 though medium settings 720p another game with a proper 30fps cap in game and it looks tremendous now msaa causes some ugly sparkling artifacts on this one but taa still looks good here and cleans everything up i saw some frame drops only in heavy weather conditions and even then it was fleeting otherwise a lot 30fps and this is a standout experience on the ironeo air so aaa then it's a mixed bag you should be thinking about the pro anyway where the extra battery life opens the door to the 15 watt mode being more viable for extended play and where 18 watts is available for a final push of extra power ryzen 7 is an expensive option for a bit more performance and it still won't get you near to steam deck but there are ways and means to get the pro running significantly faster than the base air at 12 watts that said maybe it's not just about power and performance on modern games it's worth remembering that pc gaming isn't just about the latest and greatest revisiting the old steam library yields some excellent experiences just a couple i indulged in included batman arkham city leave the dx11 options off the table and most of this plays out at 720p 60 and this kind of aesthetic on that oled screen is just delicious how about revisiting criterion's need for speed hot pursuit 720p 60 again maxed and it's still a brilliant game castlevania lords of shadow you need to be slightly judicious with the settings but again 720p60 and to this day it still looks really really cool and amazing on that oled screen so let's wrap all of this up then beautiful screen though perhaps 1080p over 720p is a tad superfluous it's got an excellent form factor and reasonable enough battery life but only if you go for the slightly bulkier pro model so over and above the points i've already made are there any other negative aspects to highlight i can name two as you might expect with a machine this small the speakers aren't great steam deck is a world ahead here but you know this can be resolved by using headphones what you can't sort out of the haptics the rumble on the ionia air amounts to nothing more than an annoying buzzing and yeah i recommend turning that off even so there's so much to commend this piece of hardware and i've enjoyed my time testing it but you can't help but feel that maybe the firm should have waited for the ryzen 6000 apus with their superior rdna 2 architecture and on paper specs that actually beat steam deck i guess the stage is set for an even better second generation product or else the already confirmed ine02 which has the ryzen 6800u apu still the iron eo air has certainly caught my attention and i'll be following the firm's fortunes with much interest but that's all for now on this one so please do like subscribe share notification bell etc and yes it would be remiss of me not to give a shout out to the df supporter program for access to our high quality video downloads brilliant community bonus materials early access and everything else but for now thanks for watching and supporting digital foundry

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 152,354

Keywords:

Id: aei6_e5k4so

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022