ROG Ally vs Nintendo Switch OLED!

this is the Rog Ally It's the fastest the most extreme handheld console to ever exist this is basically the device I've dreamed of ever since I was 10 years old and so the big question on my mind is is it good enough to actually just completely invalidate the traditional handheld consoles like the Nintendo switch well starting with the unboxing experience the RG Ally is packaged like a premium product for sure it's a thick a meaty box and the thing itself basically takes up the entire space inside of it underneath there's not actually much you basically get one side of the power adapter and the other side of the power adapter oh yeah and also a little cardboard stand hidden inside the lid now Nintendo on the other hand tries a little less hard to come across as aggressively power focused and instead just tries making their packaging scene fun it's very bright and colorful this is the fourth time I've unboxed one of these OLED switch models and honestly it still just feels exciting like Christmas morning Merry Christmas and it comes with a lot more inside the box too so I decide slightly with Nintendo for this point but the second you start using the RO two things you notice that frankly murder the switch like audio time for the creepy ear microphone again seriously did they have to make this feel like human flesh so the switch has two little speaker outlets at the bottom and they are actually better than they look this is the new OLED model and one of the main changes over the original switch is the speaker Improvement however you can just tell by the positioning of the Rog speakers that audio is a central part of the experience here listen to this literally giving me goosebumps so much higher volume for starters probably 40 louder and then while the switch sounds like a you know a decent set of phone speakers this has a level of crispness and punchiness that sits solidly two tiers above that and then the screen now considering that this switch is still 720p resolution which I mean it won't be long till there are toothbrushes with more pixels it is actually quite an ice cream not the original switch the LCD panel on that is oh not good but this OLED version has got super deep contrast color saturation pumped up to the maximum and Slimmer borders which to be honest look a little more even than the thick top and bottom that we've got on the Rog this kind of aesthetic stuff it matters to me but you can't ignore the difference in the quality of the panel itself this thing is 1080p resolution which means it's more than two times the number of pixels it runs at 120 hertz refresh rate which is insane for a handheld game console and double the switch it Peaks at around 500 nits of brightness which is not close to Top End phones but better than the 400 nits of this switch and then the icing on the cake is that it also does all of this while being more color accurate hmm see the switch OLED ships out of the box with a vivid color mode on I think Nintendo's done that to make sure that it feels differentiated from the original switches more muted colors but if you actually want to play games in the way that developers intended or you know browse the internet in a way that doesn't make it feel like you're using a children's toy then you'll actually want accurate colors which the switch OLED can sort of do but even when you turn Vivid mode off it's not as accurate as this so so far that's two points to one point initial impressions are really strong but then I try to integrate both of these into my day-to-day life and I started to notice some frictions like accessories one of the things that I love to do when I get a new Gadget is to find an ecosystem of accessories that allow me to make the most of it and to be fair there are a few interesting bits and Bobs that you can buy for the Rog like the ketra wireless earphones which are both super low latency and have active noise cancellation musically speaking these are not the best sounding earphones but they're quite purpose-built for gaming the right Curie Pro which is basically a souped up Xbox controller it's definitely cool there's customizable RGB Lighting on the front there's buttons all the way around not just on the front it's even got an OLED desk play that lets you load up your own animations which is dumb but but fun and RG has even made a gaming charger dock which effectively mimics the functionality of the Nintendo switch dock as closely as possible without getting sued for copyright it can charge the Ally like the dog while charging an accessory like the dog while also giving you HDMI to be able to connect to a TV to play like the dock this is Paul Gray don't be wrong but just by the very nature of the switch being a single piece of Hardware that over a hundred million people have bought just naturally means that you're going to be able to find a lot more things that are specifically made for it the types of cases you can get the types of controllers the car holders the switch cartridge cases all the ridiculous ways you can customize the look of it and because this competition in the market for switch accessories you can also just get a lot of them cheap whereas for a more Niche product like this you might get a couple of skins you might find a carrying case online I did actually find that the joystick covers you can use for the Nintendo switch they do work on this but there's a difference between using stuff that can work and using stuff that's made for you and this is where I prop started to come to terms with the the elephant in the room portability I mean technically both of these are portable both will fit in a rucksack or a suitcase but I do not anticipate just how much of a chungus this Rog was going to be the switch takes up genuinely half the volume and the fact that the controllers do just slip off like this does mean that if you really really want to you actually could fit all of this into your pockets yeah that ain't really happening here and this thickness it it also affects what it's like to use the alloy the uh Comfort because on one hand the fact that the switch is so slim and the control is detachable it does give it a slightly flimsy rattly feeling to it that is not the case here I can't tell you how good it feels to to finally have a nice substantial textured unit to just be able to wrap your hands around the downside though is that it also means it's heavier 608 grams versus 420. oh nice and when I first started using it I didn't think that would matter considering the vast difference in volume I was actually expecting it to be heavier than it is but longer term you start to notice something that while the switch is just light enough to be able to comfortably hold while you're standing or lying in bed with it hanging over your face with this you're constantly finding yourself searching for a surface to be able to lean on and take some of that weight off now to be fair I think the company knew this that's why they basically chopped off the edges here and sloped the handles in so they don't dig into your palms but the point is it feels bold especially after an hour of play time plus I don't really like this rear button placement they're not comfortable to press you're kind of having to like dig into the back of the console besides when my fingers are resting I don't want buttons sitting right underneath them and all of this stuff kind of adds up together to mean that when you go from this to actually just holding this in your hands you really appreciate just how clean feeling the switch is so for me Nintendo is a bit of a no-brainer for comfort however there's a flip side because the benefit of not having to squeeze every single button into this tiny chassis is that these controls are leagues ahead the main complaint people have about switch buttons is that they're small they're still responsive but they just feel sharp clicky and tight and the analog sticks are probably the weakest area they've made them shorter than more traditional console controllers I guess so that you can slip it into your pocket but the cost of that is you don't quite feel like you have as much control they're just like little Nubs oh and also joy-con drift drift has been an issue ever since the first day the Nintendo switch launched it's basically the contact Point behind the joysticks isn't quite high quality enough and so after a bit of use can just start detecting inputs even when you haven't made any I mean it does give you a great fallback excuse if you've ever unexpectedly lose a game of Mario Kart but it's bad enough for anyone who's remotely serious about gaming on this basically needs to Shell out for an external controller again not here there's a big difference between shoulder buttons that have a tight any better travel and almost feel like on off buttons versus smooth console quality ones like this all the buttons are just as responsive but softer at the same time the joysticks Glide with wide range of movements and obviously also have RGB rings around them they're a nice little customization touch and you can mess with the settings but on a device where you actually do need every minute of battery that you can get I will be turning off the second this video finishes now that's not me saying that I think these controls are going to be completely free from issues I have on a few occasions had the odd key press not register properly I've had in some games it registering key presses that I'm definitely not making the joysticks while smooth do feel a little floaty and not the most precise and on three separate occasions my x button has stayed down when I pressed it it's a little worrying because unlike with the switch where if the controller does go wrong you can just kind of swap it out for another one you're kind of stuck with what you get here but they don't feel like structural issues that are going to cause a long-term problem but it still makes me lean slightly towards the Rog as the lesser of two evils when it comes to control okay so just before we get to the games and the graphics we need to talk about the single biggest difference between these two the software the fact that the switch is running Nintendo's own operating system and that the Rog Ally is a Windows device and what this translates to is the switch being this super polished experience but one that's very controlled and the Rog being pretty unrefined but something that you can do whatever you want with both can be great like honestly I love the fact that when I'm playing games on my switch it's such a thoughtless experience you grab a cartridge you slip it in you open it and often within 10 seconds your game is loaded you don't need to think about anything else apart from just what game do I want to play but then with the Rog and basically any Windows gaming handheld you're constantly being reminded that this is not what Windows was made for you'll get these tiny fiddly menus that you can barely read and I've been having to prod around that of my oversized fingers to interact with and this is using the steam interface which is as optimized as it gets for game pads like this there's a sense of reassurance you get knowing that whenever a game releases on switch it will have been designed to factor in the exact button layout that everyone has so the developers would literally be testing their game on a switch thinking Hmm okay this action would probably be more comfortable for this button and so on but it's the other way around here the Ally is designed around approximating an Xbox controller which is what some PC game developers cater for alongside the main mouse and keyboard that they focus on so you are very much an afterthought when you launch a game and you select Gamepad modes it does in some cases automatically set up your controller for you but then sometimes some of the buttons are just mapped in a really odd way and in other times games are actually convinced that you have a keyboard attached I've lost count the number of times something has told me to press the spacebar to continue not to mention that PC versions of games in general tend to have less effort to put into their optimization there's less quality control than there is with console because there's no one company at the top who's taking responsibility for it oh yeah and on top of all of that Windows is just not designed to suspend video games without consuming power so ideally when you're planning on putting this down for even like a day you should be manually closing each game first to preserve battery which because the switch is purpose-built for this exact job it can do efficiently enough that you don't have to worry about it okay so Windows is not without its issues but can also be a blessing because it means that anything that your main computer can do this can also do you get a proper desktop class browsing experience you can use it to keep your photos on and show people a slideshow you can lock it behind your fingerprint since the power button here actually doubles as a fingerprint scanner in fact you can actually go further like if I just stick one of these USB hubs into it it becomes my computer I can connect to keyboard and mouse this HDMI goes straight to a monitor and because when you plug the Rog in it no longer has to worry about battery life it can divert more power towards its chip and run even faster so while the switch has more Hardware flexibility with its limitlessly customizable accessories this thing has more software flexibility now I'm personally not going to do much of that I use a laptop when I want to actually get stuff done and I just want this to game and so for me this having Windows is more of a burden than an opportunity but then on the other hand if you were going to use this as your everything device it can do a whole lot more and of course your operating system also affects which games you can play and when I first started using this I thought this is a no-brainer this thing can play proper full PC quality titles the same real open world Limitless massive multiplayer games that are made for Next Generation consoles on the go and are basically bottomless library of them since PC games have been being made since 1983. this is the dream right plus it can even emulate older console games I mean yeah you can also emulate some games on the switch but it's not an ideal situation Nintendo severely restricts what you can play and charges you stupid amounts to do it but with the Ally you can basically just download a piece of software called emu deck and play any console game right from the very beginning all the way up to ironically the Nintendo switch now I don't personally play many retro games I'm more of the opinion that games are continuously improving and that anytime it seems like all the games were better that that's Nostalgia talking and that within five minutes of playing those older games you'll be reminded that they're not but lots of people do like it so it is a great perk to have however there are three important caveats to the game library on Windows hey that you're probably never going to get Nintendo's first party games no Mario no smash no Pokemon which for me if I could only pick one of these new consoles I would feel their absence you could go down the emulation route but that never normally works as smoothly as running a game made for a platform B the games you do get instead are made with home PCS in mind they're the kinds of games that are designed to either be played online or failing that update often or check in online like every time you open them and so let's say you're about to do a long stretch of traveling and you wanted this to be your gaming device you would actually have to prepare to make sure that the games you want to play are actually available offline and then the third part of this which for me is the most devastating is that most of these PC games are not designed with split screen or co-op in mind PC gaming isn't really about sitting on the couch with friends and busting out some multiplayer it tends to be you're in your gaming cave I'm in my gaming cave let's play online together but for me the best part of gaming is this multiplayer I I want to be able to see the smile slowly disappear off my opponent's face as I beat them at something and in that sense it's just not close the switch and so many of its games are designed to be multiplayer you literally just slip off one of these for yourself you hand the other to your friend and you're playing together so while it is absolutely wild that this allows you to basically play Halo infinite in the palms of your hands most of the gaming experience around the games themselves feels clunky for a handheld and quite a solo Endeavor so overall I would call the game libraries a draw so the Ally is losing to the switch right now just like we're losing to Apple we're on a mission to overtake the Apple YouTube channel and subscribers and if we do I will personally build the largest most powerful iPhone on the planet so the sub to the channel would be ally totalai awesome I'm trying but wait a second why are we even making this comparison the OLED Nintendo switch is 300 the Rog Ally starts at 600 and this upper end extreme model that I have here is 700 is anyone actually picking between these two well yeah there is a price Gap but if you take a step back you realize that it's not nearly as big as you think it is and my editors are going to have a field day with that see the reason why this is more expensive aside from it obviously being higher end equipment is that this Hardware is what Rog is making their profit from Once you buy this the Rog company doesn't own you you're just using yet another Windows device you'll buy your games off steam you don't pay Rog any kind of subscription cost it's yours but with Nintendo because you're buying a closed system that has its own custom Nintendo operating system you're essentially at Nintendo's service they full well know this and they'll often even actually make a loss on the consoles themselves so that they can then make it back later through their software so the point is that the actual upfront cost of each of these doesn't tell the full cost story if you want to buy Mario Kart on a Nintendo switch fifty dollars if you want to buy Zelda breath of the wild fifty dollars these games came out six years ago but because is Nintendo's platform and there's no competition between different storefronts you pay what they want you to pay but if we look at top tier PC games from the same year like Resident Evil 7 you'll probably pay Seven dollars Sniper Elite Four is five dollars Call of Duty World War II which is as big of a name as you can get is 19 I'd say that brand new PC games are about the same price as Nintendo but it's just that they fall really quickly and you get more discounts so if you're buying let's say even just 10 to 15 of the biggest games on each of these Platforms in that alone you could be saving hundreds and that's not even factoring in Game Pass which is a subscription that you can get for Windows devices like this and if you like dipping your toes into lots of different kinds of games it means you don't even have to buy them you can just rent them and it is basically well considered to be the best value subscription deal in Tech right now the 700 Ally also comes with 512 gigs of storage versus 32 gigs on the switch so you will probably have to pay to expand that and then also you don't have to pay this to play online whereas assuming that you want to play multiplayer on your Nintendo you're basically resigning yourself to paying four dollars a month for the rest of time so honestly I think the cost of both devices even out over time right time to talk about performance now you'd like to think given what this is that it's at least five times more powerful than the switch and uh well I've got good news for you the Nintendo switch is running a mobile chip made by Nvidia and it was powerful but powerful for a mobile chip from 2015 when the chip was built and it combines that with four gigabytes of RAM now this has 16 gigabytes of super fast RAM and it combines that with an AMD ryzen Z1 extreme chip this is the creme de La Creme of mobile gaming Hardware there is no close second it's rated at over two times more powerful than even the steam deck and 21.5 times more than the switch and that even follows through to internet speed the Rog connects more reliably and gets better speeds when connected which is actually Amplified by the fact that Nintendo just does not invest enough in their online servers and so when you're actually trying to game online even though it's a paid service you can feel the lag and as for what all of this power actually means for the graphics of the games themselves well actually we can pull up the same game on both to test it so this is The Witcher 3. originally made as a vast open world game for high-end machines people were actually kind of shocked that they even made it run at all on the switch but here we are you notice straight away the resolution difference because while the Rog is perfectly happy at 1080p the switch can't even play the game at the 720p resolution of its screen so instead shoots for 540p which makes it about a quarter of the resolution then you notice the frame rate now the Rog is definitely not chilling here it's not easily running the game at like 120 frames per second it's hovering closer to 40 to 50 which still makes it smoother than the switch is 30 but not like buttery smooth but it's the game effect where it really separates itself so this Rog is running the game at high settings with a couple of the nice to have extras like Ray tracing turned off and what makes that kind of crazy is that we're talking High settings for a proper PC for a full-size Tower and monitor sit down at your desk and play kind of experience and so I really don't want to understate that being able to hold that in your hands is I mean it feels wrong it feels like it shouldn't be possible when this works and when you get a game where the control scheme adapts well where the PC Port is well optimized you feel like you are holding the future and that's the feeling that this entire concept exists for but it's just that there is so much baggage you have to deal with to get there and nowhere is that more apparent than battery so both devices are set up they're fully charged it's around 9 30 in the morning and one thing that you'll immediately notice is the difference in how much time you spend waiting for things to happen on this Rog I booted up this exact same game yesterday but it's still taking so much time to actually get into it the battery is quite a lot bigger on this than on the switch but it's just there is a vast difference between the power consumption of a mobile based chip and a PC based chip whose original purpose didn't really need to factor in power consumption so I'm not expecting this to go well for the alloy and that's not even factoring in the fans normal PCS naturally have great airflow but because this is such a compact device it has to create its own and it does that with some very loud and quite energy inefficient fans oh I appear to have managed to get myself stuck which is actually kind of perfect so let's just leave Mario racing and my other car mounting a rock and see how long it takes for them to run out and while that's going on what about your airflow that's where the brand new ace3 comes in but I first came across this I thought it was kind of funny but let me tell you this is a serious bit of kit it's essentially an air conditioner that sits around your neck the ace3 uses its six sensors it's 52 heat dissipation fins and I'm not even joking it's quad core semiconductor chip to check your body temperature your heart rate your blood oxygen and the ambient temperature 80 times per minute it'll use that to figure out if you're feeling hot or stuffy or fatigued and then according to that uses both its thermal cooling pads and its quad fan array to blow either heated or cooled air not just room temperature air like most fans both upward and downward at the same time you can change your temperature by a full 14 degrees Celsius oh also the design is apparently inspired by human arms so if your loved one is away on a long trip to America and you're all alone at home and you're slightly sad well I guess this is the closest thing to a hug or more accurately a small tug the thing has a 7 000 milliamp hour battery it can last up to 24 hours charging 2.5 hours and when you take it off it knows and it will go on to standby by itself after five minutes oh yeah and the coolest thing is that when you're not using it around your neck you stick it on the stand and it becomes an air conditioner for your room wait no it's not even lunch time it's 10 55 am and the Rog is gone just one hour 28 minutes after starting and the switch at this point is on 69 it's almost like you planned that Nintendo I mean for me personally that is a deciding factor I mean sure you could say well the switch is only running Mario Kart that was running a proper PC title but that is the entire point of the device now you can force the chip to consume a lower wattage and push up the battery all the way to about four hours but that's only going to work if you wanted to also scale down the quality of the game you were playing on it to the point where what you have would be no better looking than the switch this feeling that the Rog can give you when everything just works it is basically everything I've ever dreamed of since I was this tall but unless you've really done your research and you're happy to put up with all the Grievances that come with it for an average user I think the traditional handheld is still the better option not to mention that the switch is due an upgrade in the next couple of years which should hopefully Bridge a lot of the Gap in terms of Graphics while also giving you the conveniences of a purpose-built gaming machine

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 2,767,490

Keywords: rog ally, rog, nintendo, gaming

Id: bk_o8N-Dzus

Length: 22min 48sec (1368 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/InfiniteBoops]

Linus said the same thing about their pre production unit for their video a month or so ago and the recent version for their review today, both had the X stick.

A bit concerning.

[u/hfourm]

According to the verge review, this has been fixed in the production models

[u/3lfk1ng]

Several reviews reported that the X button got stuck under the front cover. Might be worth waiting a few months for a revision.

[u/mario-64]

Mine will go right back to Best Buy if it has any sticky buttons.