Steam Deck OLED vs ROG Ally - Which One Should You Buy?

obviously this week that was the um launch of the steam deck OLED and there was the predictable uh Rush uh to the steam store to basically crash the site and get a hold of this hot new hardware uh but in the meantime basically across the whole week people have been asking me one question I'm getting DMS about it I'm getting you know it's it's the question I guess it's because um the Asus vog allers basically had1 pound shaved off its retail price for Black Friday and the question is should I get a Rog Ally or should I get the steam deck OLED and um yeah two different devices that two that do two very different things but there is a great deal of crossover and I guess they are comparable um I'm going to start by talking about benchmarks here because um I benchmarked four games between the Steam uh deck LCD and the OLED model um for my steam Deck review so I basically reched um those games on the Rog Ally and I benched them at uh the 15 watt performance mode and the 25 watt turbo mode um yeah it should be stated that battery life at 15 watts is significantly worse than the steam deck and significantly worser still than the OLED whereas 25 watts is which is where you get the you know a lot more performance um yeah basically your battery life takes an even further uh bigger hit but let's talk about the games so we're going to kick off with fors of horizon 5 here uh this one's going first because it kind of represents our best case scenario for the Ally up against steam deck at least in the uh four Benchmark games I've got here for you uh really interesting results here at Native 720p High settings 4X msaa and long motion blur shutter speed which is the way I like it so in the Allies 50 W performance mode there's 36% boost up against uh the deck OLED pretty substantial and that increases up to 69% in the 25 wat turbo mode so um bearing in mind the power and Architectural improvements of the zed1 extreme up against van go in the deck kind of what I'd expect really um pretty happy with these results good stuff uh yeah you can see occasionally here that the deck OLED definitely has less sta than the deck CD and it runs a bit faster overall but still I'd call this a strong start for the Ally um but things kind of switch up as we look at the other games right and um we're in a plague to our recream now and some pretty sobering results on this one so deck OLED nice 8.3% boost up against deck LCD and that's actually enough to give it virtual parity with the Rog allies 15 watt performance mode it's just 2.9% faster which is just basically outside um sort of margin of error there uh turbo mode 25 watts on the Ally 34% boost to Performance there over the deck OLED but um yeah this area in the game is pretty demanding on mobile chipsets and yeah that 34 percentage Point boost actually translates to 53 FPS on average so you're in a nice vrr window there I'm not actually sure what frame rate Camp you could give to the deck uh with a 39 f FPS average not quite at 40 I guess you'd have to drop down to 30 so that's an interesting example actually of how vrr sort of elevates the Ally to a a different performance tier really uh even so you're still paying for that with a lot of extra battery power for that extra performance at similar power levels as you can see the Ally gives you nothing much more really uh but let's move on so um couple more benchmarks here and going to see some weird result results I guess because you know you'd expect the Ally just to be faster overall generally whatever the scenario uh Marvel Spider-Man deck OLED is beating deck LCD by 7.4% but in this part of the game the info sequence here it also beats the Allies performance mode by um 7.8% uh which is unexpected again you need to give the zed1 extreme a lot more juice to beat the steam deck 25 watt handheld Turbo mode extra 29% of performance so on the face of it not a great look for the Ally really at 15 watts you don't get much of a boost up against the deck in fact you don't get anything uh but once you go hell for leather with the power and uh to hell with battery life I guess then yeah it's a game changer and um with the Ally you're not beholden to frame rate caps really with that vrr screen extra 29% of performance once again uh works really nicely with a vrl screen which is something you don't have on Steam deck of course uh let's round off with a final Benchmark uh cyberp Punk 2077 and it's our uh in City streaming run um I actually got weirdly conflicting results with the official Benchmark on the Ally if I ran it before the streaming test it would be much much faster than the deck but if I ran it after the streaming test it would be you know a bit slower which is odd so I stuck with the streaming test right consistent results each run and it's a better workout for the Seas CPU and GPU anyway really another example of the deck running better than the Ally at 15 watts here surprisingly with a deck OLED offering uh extra 17 percentage point lead over the Ally and even the LCD model 8% faster than the Ally at 15 watts but once again give the zed1 extreme extra juice and we're really at the races 32 percentage point lead for Ally over de OLED um yeah weird one this I guess I remember remember seeing some stories about cyberp Punk on Linux running faster than Windows and there were some outlandishly high figures there and this may well be the kind of mobile iteration of that there are several uh examples I think we've seen where the Linux driver um is actually just more efficient than the windows one in some scenarios which sounds kind of nuts but it is true and uh certainly looks like What's Happening Here interesting stuff though so you know overall looking at these bench marks as I bring this monologue to an end um bottom line is that vrr plus the extra performance can really work for the Ally right but at the same time it's pretty rare for the specs of the zed1 extreme to make themselves known to the extent that you'd really want and yeah I guess that's the end of of the commentary on the benchmarks here but obviously there's a lot more to the package than just the performance numbers alone although obviously that is going to be a major attraction for the uh for for the Rog Ally there yeah so that's kind of the way the Rog faces up against um the deck in terms of performance screenwise obviously you guys haven't seen it but OLED is always going to beat an LCD but vrr is something which opens up a lot of possibilities for the for the Rog Ally um John what what do you make of all that massive information dump I just gave well it just makes me still want to go for this team that olid because mainly because I look at something like the rag Aly and it looks it's it's a nice product I've held one um but because it's such a still it's like a normal PC style experience uh which can be a positive but at that point I'd almost just rather get a small laptop that's a little more capable uh versus the steam deck which I think the steam deck seems to occupy the space where it Bridges uh the gap between PC and console delivering an almost conso like experience but with some of the additional Freedom you get with the PC so when gauging the two products it's for me it's not really just about the performance right like yeah you get you can get some better performance on the rag Ally but it's still not the same kind of experiencing this I would necessarily want as a portable device plus there's the battery life considerations as well to consider so uh if I were making the choice right now I would definitely still select the steam deck OLED over it now before I might have I might have thought a little bit differently about it because this the original steam deck LCD is so bad and uh the Rog Ally of course the one big benefit it does have and I have to admit this is a huge one it's vrr uh and this is something steam de cannot do uh and for a portable device with limited amount of you know capabilities you can expect some frame rate instability depending on your settings and this that would essentially act as the cushion for it yeah whereas on Steam deck you really got to optimize the game to make sure that you're getting at least a pretty locked experience which could mean more sacrifices especially on the less capable Hardware but you know they have the frame rate cap features in there that work pretty well I would say so yeah yeah I think they you know I see them as two quite different devices that are occupying a similar space that's right um the thing I'd like to point out is that obviously there's going to be games that you can run on the Rog Ally because it runs on Windows that you can't on the steam deck because for various reasons they've been locked out of Linux um it's quite tricky to get games that aren't in Steam um you know for example Alan Wake 2 running on the steam deck and of course there's the fact that you know that extra performance generally gives you enough extra leeway in order to actually get a game like Alan Wake to working on the r Ally whereas I suspect it be extremely challenging to do the same on the steam deck that also raises the point about what type of games you actually want to play on these devices absolutely and I feel like something like Allen wake 2 is exactly the type of game I would not ever care about playing on a portable system just it's not meant for that like the way that game is designed it just doesn't seem to work well I feel like you're sacrificing too much to enjoy it right and least of all uh the hardware requirements but it's also about just where you would use a portable device right like you kind of kill the atmosphere of a game like that and it's a slow paced game game slower paced so there a lot of these high-end triaa games that you look at running on these portable systems like it's neat that they can do it but they're not always that well suited to portable play yeah good point uh any Impressions from you Alex uh not really I just kind of want to stress what I said the week before is that you know I when you start getting into the higher end territory of these devices I do wonder if a laptop is actually maybe your best better suited thing at which point then the the range of that you could scale above something like the raw II actually it just goes up quite a lot as you as you advance up to a laptop even for the lower-end kit so um yeah that's kind of what I have to say yeah I mean that that is a really good point because um you know when I was doing that RTX 2050 testing for the switch to S so uh sort of um examination the 2050 with like massively cut back clocks was basically in Rog Ally territory right so that's a 2050 if you move down you know towards today's 4050 or 4060 more efficient more features more performance and yeah it's it's going to completely annihilate what you can do on these handhelds the difference being of course it's not a handheld right I'll be interested to see what kind of battery life you can actually get from those 4050 and 4060 um uh laptops as well uh I'd really like to take a look at that actually come to think of it um but yeah I I guess we should move on to some supporter questions on this topic um this one from Admiral spudman I have a problem with valves quote unquote that technology doesn't exist yet as for why they haven't updated the Apu in the steam deck the current Apu of zen2 CPU cor zen3 was a big jump in performance for AMD why not at least update the CPU CES obviously it's not that simple but in theory it would have been a big boost so um yeah we did um I did take a look at the 6800 U which I believe used I think that was Zen 3 maybe it was Zen 2 but um what we're generally finding is it's it's there's a lot of stuff going on Within These apus that limit performance you know the power budget for one and the fact that you're mostly GPU limited uh in most scenarios and the CPU doesn't seem to be having a gigantic impact on on performance maybe if you're sort of going to be pairing back the GPU features um substantially in order to move the CPU to the four um I'm not seeing this kind of big jump in performance um uh from from you know from the extra from the newer architecture but also the fact it's got double the amount of cores know there's nothing gamechanging in there um and um this question from B spoke valves Pierre Loop has stated a few times that he feels a 15 wat TDP cap is the max a handheld should ever have this of course leads to a design that favors better low TDP performance and good battery life what's your take on this philosophy um well I think his philosophy is actually bang on the money right because you know I just showed you the benchmarks from a chip that's running at 25 watts that has 50% more compute units running on a new arc architecture that has double the amount of CPU cores running on a newer architecture we should be seeing game-changing performance but we're not right and this kind of ties in exactly with what they're saying about the technology not existing yet for a steam deck 2 maybe when we reach the point where um Steam OS will be running properly and valve certified on these windows devices we'll get to see a better picture of efficiency of these AMD AP use but I think it's the fact that valve specifically targeted a limited Hardware configuration for the deck to actually get the best balance of performance versus silicon I think they did a really good job there and you look at the steam OLED and it's you know it's it's it's pretty fantastic overall um I guess we should try and sum this up uh and I think ultimately the Rog Ally is great if you have no real concern about battery life I mean Oliver loves his and he has a big bunch of uh rechargeable batteries that he adds into the USBC port to get you know better battery life um but yeah and it has that vrr screen which is really really useful it solves a lot of your problems when you're thinking about how to Target you know performance versus the capabilities of the Silicon um but the steam deck OLED basically solves so many of the issues of the original model uh the battery life is better significantly better and it's already class leading uh the screen is on another level compared to any handheld device I've ever seen I think right now just you know for a mainstream PC user who wants a handheld PC there's only really one choice and that is the steam de OLED because it takes care of so much for you if you're an Enthusiast that wants performance that wants the VR screen that is okay to occasionally you know slot in a USB hub into your handheld in order to set things up um The Rock Ally is also a great device uh maybe there's some more content we could do on that in due course um but I think that's my take on it now I think that's pretty reasonable

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Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2023