I was wrong about the ASUS ROG Ally...

when the Rog Ally first came out I thought that there was going to be this huge performance difference between the Steam deck and the Rog Ally and when I started playing games on the r Ally I was just I was satisfied I mean I like the vrr the 120 hertz I like the extra juice that's there in terms of power but the comfort of having that steam deck and the Steam OS as a whole just delivered a better experience overall so I just stuck to playing games on my steam deck after a bunch of driver updates and just checking out everything that has been updated on the Rog Ally I decided to give it another go see all the RPGs all the Sid scrollers that I like to play on my steam deck they were there they were fine and even some of the Retro emulated games that I play on the steam deck through emo deck great awesome I had a great time but there was this little indie game that came out that pushed me over to the r Ally I don't know if you ever heard of it it's called Uh balers Gate 3 it's this little tiny Indie that came out and it really became this power hungry game see I played it on my desktop here I've got a 3080 Fe and I have a great time playing it eventually I bought it again on PS5 and I love it it's great but as my wife got into playing it on PS5 I started playing it here and also testing it out through Cloud saves on my RG Ally and my steam deck and that's really truly where I got to see the big difference in performance between these two handheld see I was personally happy with 40 frames per second and 40 HZ on the steam deck it's a a nice Nifty 40 that just does the job and in terms of frame rates and micr Frames everything just worked it was awesome but then I started noticing the performance dips and the fact that I needed to lower the visual Fidelity on the steam deck in order to actually get the game the way that I wanted and to get the frames that I wanted see I was jumping to and from my PC experience to my PlayStation 5 and then eventually inevitably onto my steam deck and and the way that the game just runs overall just it left a lot to be desired so I looked at my Rog Ally and that's really truly where I started to see that I could get better graphical Fidelity I could get better frames and overall a better experience in terms of performance on the Rog Ally in contrast to the steam deck now after having the Rog Ally for roughly 5 months there are other things that I've noticed for example the battery life is just atrocious there's no way that you're going to get a AAA title something like balers Gate 3 and Play More Than maybe an hour maybe an hour and a half maybe an hour 20 minutes like you're just not going to get more so it's nice to be close to an outlet of some kind just so that you can go ahead and power your handheld while you're gaming now me personally I play either in bed or on the couch somewhere where it's a little bit more comfortable than sitting here in front of a desk especially when you work on a computer all day long for your day job so it's nice to have an experience like that in a handheld form obviously things get extremely hot when you're playing something like that and no I haven't had any issues with the micro SD card slot but I do know that that's something that's there after a couple of patches there is an undeniable increase in the fan curve speed for the leftand fan that is where the micro SD card slot is at obviously that is a design flaw and there's absolutely nothing that can be done because that is Hardware there's only so much that you can do with a ramped up fan curve which will inevitably decrease the lifespan of the fan but I digress on top of that the screen is absolutely beautiful guys I I don't think that I've seen a better screen on a handheld aside from maybe the Nintendo switch OLED I really like the way that the OLED portrays colors and just punches them out at you in terms of like the screen itself it's 120 htz you have the uh vrr support that's there and there's constantly updates that are happening that allow for much more customization I mean recently there was an update from AMD that goes ahead and allows for 900p which is is great I mean you're just having much more flexibility uh in terms of the screen and what you can go ahead and do with that that's not to mention that it is also a much brighter screen than the steam deck but I'm not here to compare it directly to the steam deck I'm just here to share my journey going from the steam deck to the Rog Ally ergonomically the Rog Ally still leaves a lot to be desired I love the way that the steam deck feels in my hands and I do know that dbrand went ahead and announced that they are going to have the kill switch version of their case for the Rog Ally I've already pre-ordered it I cannot wait to have that in my hands because that means that it will feel much more comfortable especially in comparison to how it is without a case at all for the Rog Ally now I know that there's a lot of people that commented underneath my video comparing the steam deck and the Rog Ally saying that the lack of trackpads is just that's a deal breaker they cannot go ahead and have a handheld that doesn't have trackpads especially coming from the steam deck I personally understand that sentiment but again personally I don't I I just I don't use my trackpads that I don't see the need for them especially for the games that I play now if you have any sort of recommendations any sort of tweaks or anything like that leave in them in the comments i' would love to check something out that would go ahead and make me want to have the trackpads readily available uh whenever I need them but in terms of playing the games that I play they're fine I just I don't need trackpads no there are back buttons that are there which the steam deck has four and the Asus RG Ali only has two now I've never really had to use them too much but I do like to have specific button layouts or anything like that set up so that I can quickly toggle between applications if needed like having an ALT tab that's just maed out to that specific button if needed but overall it's just it's something that I personally don't really think about too much whenever I'm playing games in terms of docking things I did get the 65 wat charger dock that came from Asus and I've Barely Used it if I'm being honest I've only used it a couple of times initially when I got it I thought it was great because I could go ahead and play on my handheld and then take it down St hook it up to my LG OLED and just keep on playing on the TV screen the experience of doing that though was not seamless at all it was just it still to this day is not a seamless experience and it doesn't provide that same experience that you would get using your steam deck and going to Big Picture Mode so because of that I primarily used the Rog Ally in handheld mode versus using it plugged into a television I still don't really see the purpose behind having a dedicated egpu especially when it is a proprietary connection so that means that you cannot take this and connect it to something else now if you had an egpu that you could connect to this and by any chance you needed to connect it to I don't know a laptop so you can edit video or photo or just game on the go and have an actual dedicated 4090 or whatever it may be that would be awesome but the way the Asus went ahead and set this up for the Asus RG Ally it's a one and done deal once you have that like this is pretty much the only thing that you can use it on and that just I I'm not a fan I don't like it I would never recommend it if you're going to spend that much money just get yourself either an awesome gaming laptop or just go with an actual dedicated Tower where you can get more bank for your buck in the grand scheme of things I have seen people talk about say them saying that the Asus Rog Ally is their go-to computer they use this for literally everything and that's fine there's nothing wrong with that because there are people that use the steam deck in the same fashion and I'm pretty sure that people use the iOS whatever in the same fashion but when it comes down to it I just I personally do not see the need for that I don't know maybe that's just me when it comes to the speakers I absolutely love them they were amazing but there was this problem that kept on popping up all the time there was this crackling audio that would come whenever I was playing specific games and after a little bit of Googling turns out that this is because of the Dolby spatial audio that's there essentially it just adds an extra layer of processing and it's cool because when it does work it creates kind of like this uh faux full 3d experience so it's almost kind of like having 3D audio without having headphones on so it's kind of cool but it just it doesn't work because there's always problems in terms of the audio itself there's just crackling that's going on almost like a a slight delay so I had to go into the settings and actually turn that off and once I turned that off it was fine the speakers are great they're still loud it just it doesn't provide that 3D spatial audio experience that you would get with with that toggled on but at the end of the day I would just rather have good seamless audio than 3D audio that's crackling all the time couple of complaints that I do have in terms of the button layout and everything like that it's nice it does the job and it feels relatively similar to the steam deck in terms of where the buttons are and where you push them the d-pad definitely leaves a lot to be desired on this man especially in comparison to other things like apid Do's ultimate Bluetooth controller or uh even the Xbox series controller like those d-pads are absolutely awesome but the d-pad on the Asus R Ali I just I don't know the more that I use it the more lackluster that it is the dead zones on the analog sticks are absolutely like they're huge they're absolutely humongous so whenever I'm playing a game you have to really go ahead and push out the analog stick in whichever direction that you want in order for your character or the cursor or whatever it is that you're doing to actually move this definitely is something that people in the comments of my original review went ahead and said that oh well all you have to do is adjust that in the settings in the Armory crate no that is false you can even with everything adjusted to the maximum there is still a huge dead zone that is in the middle and there's if no ifs answer or buts about it I was hoping that in time that would be patched out and it would be fixed but that is no longer the case that left button that is right here still leaves a lot to be desired I mean it still happens from time to time that it just gets stuck and you push it and it kind of like clicks into place it's the weirdest thing I swear to God I am not beating the beesus out of this handheld I'm babying the heck out of it especially because it doesn't have any sort sort of like protective case on it but it it just from time to time whenever I'm playing it just gets caught and I don't know what it is that's inside I haven't taken this apart yet but it's definitely something that's weird there's some problem that's happening with that left button that's there I don't like the fact that I have to kind of like almost reach over in order to actually push up the volume button like this is just really poor design obviously like you can hit the command center and go into the volume and just adjust it using the screen that's there at the top screen or going in and just pushing the a button moving it up or down but I would like having a tactile volume button and just having that all the way up in the center just feels really weird the power button that's there works just fine especially as a fingerprint reader as long as you remember which direction you have your finger and don't uh use a different part of the media part of your fingertip you'll be fine but it's quick it's fast and it'll tell you very quickly whether or not you have it in the right spot or not as Asus continues to update the drivers and the firmware on this handheld it becomes better and better and better the one thing that I'm really afraid of is whether or not Asus is going to continue supporting this the moment that the Asus Rog Ally 2 comes out or whatever the heck the next name is going to be the sequel to this handheld are they going to continue supporting the original handheld as frequently and um as passionately as as they have been because let's face it Asus is a hardware manufacturer they hardware company whereas the steam deck they are more focused on software so they don't want to go ahead and release iterations of Hardware continuously they want to release one piece of Hardware make it the best that it can be and continue to support it via software so with that being said it just it makes me question the validity of having this handheld and purchasing it if you didn't just get it within that first wave or the second wave of uh units that came out from manufacturing I like the Asus Rog Ali I like the power that's there and again continually with those updates and those tweaks and drivers that have being released the performance just continues to get better and better and they're squeezing more and more out of the hardware I just want more of that going into next year and the year after that I don't want to have to go ahead and continuously buy new Hardware in order to play my games from uh Asus on my Rog Ally I just I wanted it to work I will say that the thing that I do like about the docking experience is that technically I can use any third party dock that I got for my steam deck and I could use it with the Asis R Ally and it works just fine I primarily have a bunch of JSO docks that are just lying around and they just work so if you have a JSO dock that you already had for the steam deck or if you just have one randomly you can just plug it into the Asus R Ally and it works just fine without any issues obviously there are some limitations in terms of like the visual Fidelity of it especially if you're planning on you know using specific resolutions or whatever it may be but when it comes out there it just works you don't really have to worry too much about anything else when it comes to emulating older titles on your Rog Ally you don't have to worry about running out of horsepower by any means I mean this thing is a beast that being said you do have to go ahead and take into consideration that this is a handheld and there's only so much that it can go ahead and do I haven't ran into any issues in terms of emulating older titles and even some of the more recent titles run without any sort of hitch but emu deck or AMU deck is what I use to get everything set up and running and integrated into my steam library on this handheld it's in an early build right now that's available for patrons and when I got my hands onto it and got everything set up it started out working just fine but I still run into hiccups from time to time for example the a button just doesn't work for whatever reason it may be and sometimes I have instances where the emulation just crashes that could be something that's tied to the emulation itself could be the way that UD deck got everything set up or whatever it may be maybe it's my controller layout but I would prefer to have a more smoother experience like I have on the Emu deck in the steam deck it just runs smoother and gets everything up and running that being said I do like the fact that emu deck or muud deck is being ported over to Windows that way more people have it readily available with the legion go that's coming out soon I would like to see whether or not things run smoothly over there as well and honestly it's just awesome I like the fact that there's so many options that are available for people that are interested in emulation as a whole so who is the Asus R Ally form the way that I see it this is for somebody that wants the Windows Experience in a handheld form factor for Better or For Worse obviously with the hardware that's here you're going to get the best screen that I've ever seen on a handheld so far as well as a refresh rate that is awesome a chipset that can power through most games that are out there and yes there is the 3D spatial audio that is nice to have when it works there is going to be that design flaw with the micro SD card that's there and if you want to go ahead and get extra juice you technically have to go ahead and get an egpu that has a proprietary link but you are going to have windows so you are going to have the accessibility and the availability of multiple launchers so if you want to play games on EGS or steam or Gog you can do so without having to worry about doing any crazy work rounds like you would have to with the steam deck and if you want to get Xbox game pass games installed natively on your handheld you can do so without any worries for $7 700ish do USD it's not that bad so if you're interested in hearing my review or at least my big initial review of the Asus R Ally then click this video over here and if you want to hear my comparison of the Asus RG Ally to the steam deck then click this video over here until next time guys I will see you on the next one peace

Channel: Baldly Rudy

Views: 175,412

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Id: QiGmLF_kwsE

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023