The Best ROG Ally tips and tricks

ladies and gents hello and welcome to a special episode of RNG pulse where we're diving in to give you all some tips and tricks if you acquired yourself an Rog Ally the newest handheld gaming that's been on the market for two days two days two only two days yeah glorious um yes we are you know so I know a lot of you guys are like still getting your hands on the device still getting acquainted with everything setting it up um and so that's kind of what this is all about before we start I do want to to note that um we know that there are a few issues out there that people are having I know that um the dead zones are feeling a little bit big for some people um and the latest bios there are some talk about the latest bios uh reducing performance as well our team is looking into those things Brett Knott we're working on it our team is investigating everything we've by the way we monitor all the discords the subreddit all of that stuff like we see everything even if you don't see us necessarily in every conversation we see it and we are working on that stuff all the time and we see all the feature requests too which we can at least a little feature requests on the list we can at least let people know those things are software related and they should be something that we can address soon yes should be so but uh once you get oh also yeah yeah Jordan or Discord too and um the community will help you out yeah sorry is that what you just said no but that's okay okay join our Discord uh and the community can uh help you guys out as well you guys can kind of trade your own tips and tricks and and set up stuff so um but once you do get it set up these are like this stream this this video is kind of all about the different features and kind of shortcuts and other little tips that you can use to make the absolute most out of the Ally all of this is available in an article that we put together as well the link for that will be in the description of the video but we also kind of wanted to show it live yeah so you kind of see it in action we're also going to be releasing individual videos for a lot of these tricks and stuff too that are a little bit more in depth but this is more of a overview of like if you want everything in one place in like a like a talk show and explanation format Woodson's going to be kind of guiding us through um with a live demonstration yeah so let's let's start let's show it off so this is my Rog Ally this is one of my Rog allies there's three on my desk right now um but uh so you can see that I've actually already gotten this set up but most of the stuff is still socks stock settings so I'm going to kind of show some of this stuff off when you first get your ally the first thing that I recommend everyone do is is run through software updates because um there are already a lot of new features that have come out since we package these devices at the factory um and if you want the latest and greatest stuff you're going to want to update it so the first thing that you can do is hear an Armory crate you can navigate over to the content tab you can do that using the left and right bumpers or using the touch screen I like the touch screen honestly um head here to update Center uh and you hit this check for updates button at the top now I'm already updated as far as I know um okay there is a little update there there's so there yeah that's a little tiny bug fix that went out last night nothing like super major nothing that most people will probably even notice but that did go out I believe a day ago so this is a great example that you can see here then you would tap update and it will update your software for you now you may have to do this a few times because sometimes it'll update one thing and that thing being updated means that another thing becomes available for you so check until there are no more updates in Armory crate the next thing that you want to do is go to down here you see uh this little blue a icon that is our my Asus app um the our Armory crate is our like gaming software um with a lot of gaming Centric features the my Asus app is our uh app that's on all of our laptops and portable devices like this and so this has a lot of like drivers and things like that in it again you can see in this Square kind of in the middle that it says my system is up to date um but again you would tap that check for updates both in Essentials and latest and download stuff there again there is some um some users are reporting lowered performance on the latest bios 319 if you want to hold off on that bios update you can um but there are going to be other updates here too like for the fingerprint scanner there's a driver I think that some people were seeing that that helped with the fingerprint scanner things like that so I would update the other things that are available in that app and then of course you'll have Windows updates as well as usual and sometimes those can take a little bit as depending on how many updates Microsoft has rolled out how many driver updates you're seeing a lot of the those driver updates will come through Windows update but my Asus will get them ahead of time so you shouldn't have to use my Asus too much for driver updates in the future unless you want to be on the bleeding edge it's kind of only important for like that day one gotta get all the new stuff so that's tip number one once you have done that the fun begins uh you can start learning how to use the Ally so one of the first things that I like to tell people is that when you leave Army crate when you press that little Armory crate button on the right side of the screen um it will minimize and underneath is a Windows desktop it's just Windows under this that's why it's compatible with so many games that's why you have so much power available at your fingertips um and and a lot I mean there's a lot of third-party tools out there too that are made for Windows some made for this device specifically I can't really comment on those because I haven't used them but I know they're out there that's the beauty of windows to get around windows you can use the touch screen um that's what I find to be the most useful is just tap it on the screen and windows is already optimized for touch out of the box on this device but if you prefer to kind of navigate with a cursor or you need a little bit more Precision you can use the right stick to move the cursor around like a mouse and then the right shoulder button acts as a click the right trigger button acts as a right click so that's uh just another way that you can kind of get around the Ally as well um one thing that I've seen a lot of people uh the the most useful shortcut when you're first setting up the Ally is bringing up that on-screen keyboard by default like when you tap in a text box like this um the keyboard should just pop up I don't know why mine's so tiny though that's not usually I must have pressed a button somewhere by accident um it usually doesn't do that so the keyboard should just come up in certain programs that don't like necessarily respect Windows is like touch keyboard settings it may not pop up automatically and especially in some games that like require you to type in your name for your character or something in those cases uh press the M1 or M2 buttons on the back of the device um those are the macro buttons the paddles these ones right here uh hold one of those and press up on the d-pad and the keyboard will pop up really really useful you can also press this triangle button on the left hand side that's our Command Center button that will bring a slide out menu that has a bunch of different functions one of which is bringing up the keyboard we'll talk more about the command center in a moment but I just wanted to like let people know how to kind of navigate around windows because you will need to do that to install like um I think Steam and Xbox come pre-install but if you want to install epic or Gog or one of those other launchers you'll do that through Windows just like you would on on a PC so once those launchers are installed oops sorry I had to press B to get out of there you can start installing games and when you install games they will appear automatically in Armory crate um now you may have to kind of do this swipe down to refresh thing in order for it to populate um but they will install games should just automatically show up in Armory crate which is really nice so that way you know the whole design of this was that you can have steam Xbox epic you know Gog like I was talking about all those other launchers but all your games come into one place it's just one unified menu with all of your installed games you don't have to start opening up other launchers to find stuff uh and there you go if a game does not automatically show up in Armory crate you can press this add button here along the top see that add boom and you will get a list of installed software on your computer and you can check one of these and put it in the list um that's really handy if the app doesn't show up in this list like if you know there are some like indie games that you just download as a zip file and you just kind of drag the folder onto your computer it's not like installed in the traditional sense um those won't always show up in this list to do that uh look at the bottom of the screen you'll see that there are control tips those are all throughout Armory crate so you'll see you can press the left or right button to open File Explorer and browse to the exe file of the game that you or program that you want to add so that uh is an option as well and then from there you can actually highlight any of these games and press X to customize the game profile we'll talk about that a little bit more but that includes customizing the name and the artwork and stuff like that so some of these games it'll download thumbnails automatically but in some cases like you can see Tony Hawk one and two for some reason it didn't grab that artwork I can add that manually to that game like I've done with some of these others remember that the Rog sorry go ahead uh just this is the thing where you can get really creative if you wanted to nail like a certain aesthetic to this screen and you wanted to make everything yes like you know black and white or certain color palette or whatever you want to do that's something that you could have some fun with totally totally yeah that's really cool a cool way to do that um remember also that the Ally comes with three months free of Xbox game pass ultimate um a lot of people were looking for like a code in the Box it's not like that if you just open the Xbox app it will notify you and say like hey here's your free three months and you just say thank you and then you can install all kinds of free games on your device or stream them instantly which is awesome the follow-up question that we see a lot with that is um it will stack on an existing Game Pass ultimate subscription so it's not only for new accounts if you have an existing account you just you know click OK and then it applies to three months and then you it'll tell you your your you know subscription expires mine said July 2024 in my email I got after I applied it yeah there you go so um you can have a bunch of free games right away we also have a guide I'll throw this in the in the chat we have a guide on how to like save money on PC games and get free ones because I I love to get free games at every single opportunity I'm kind of a weird Cheapskate that way my library is overflowing with free games all right next up uh one thing that I always tell people if you did not do it during setup that up the fingerprint sensor in uh in Windows so you can see that the the power button is actually a fingerprint scanner so you don't have to type in a password or a pin when you first turn on the rgi what's really cool about this is that it will actually cache your fingerprint if you press the button properly when you turn on the device make sure that your whole finger covers the button when you turn it on and it will actually scan your fingerprint at that time that you're turning on the device cache it and then when it gets to the Windows login screen instead of you having to rest your finger again it'll just send the fingerprint from when you turned on the device so it'll just boot right into Armory crate basically very cool um we did find some people that after updating some drivers they had to register their fingerprint again to get it to work properly so even if you did set it up initially this is a good time to do it you can do that under settings accounts uh sign in options and you can use fingerprint recognition with Windows hello to set that up really really useful feature love that was so happy to see that when they first when they first showed us the device I was like because who wants to type in a password every time you open up your handheld no no no hell no no and that's even a passcode like no no no thank you um okay next tip this is tip number five by the way we're on tip number five we have 15 to share uh tip number five this is a really really easy one if you need to force quit an app or um if you just want a really quick way to like shut down the device or or put it to sleep I got again that command center button that triangle one on the left hand side press and hold that and you will get the control alt delete screen in the bottom right corner so multiple uses there so that's how I used to shut down the device um but what I actually did now is that I actually went into the control panel um if you search like it's called change what the power button does I said it so that when I press the power button it just goes immediately into hibernate yeah which is is pretty cool you don't need to do that um windows will fall asleep automatically and we have a function in there that if for some reason it isn't falling asleep properly like the Ally will force itself into sleep so you don't drain a ton of battery but you know I like hibernate so that's those are some little tips here is something awesome if you want to dig a little bit deeper if you go into Armory create settings tab and under control mode you click this configuration button you can remap almost every button on the Allies Gamepad to fit kind of your play style or your needs you can do this both for games Gamepad mode or for the desktop for like navigating desktop so if you would rather move the mouse with like the left stick instead of the right stick you can do that you can remap all of that here before you do so make sure that the device is in Auto control mode in the command center here because if it's not the buttons the new button mappings might not take so we'll open game at Gamepad mode for example and you can see okay if I want to actually let's not do that because that's that's maybe a little bit weirder in desktop mode let's say I wanted to change the a button to be left click which I actually like I would go down to this I would select the a button and I could change its primary function you have a lot of things to choose from here you can assign it to a different button on the GamePad you can assign it to a Windows action like the Xbox button or bringing up the task manager or opening the magnifier like accessibility options things like that you can assign it a keyboard key a mouse button or create your own custom macro like if you wanted to assign alt f4 to a button or something like that now you wouldn't want to assign something like alt f4 to just like the a button because then you're going to accidentally be quitting apps like all the time so remember when we talked about those macro buttons on the back and how they can kind of act as shortcuts that's what these secondary functions you see are so if we go into like Gamepad mode secondary functions for some of these buttons the secondary secondary function for the a button is taking a screenshot so if I hold the macro button and press a boom screenshot of my game uh that's kind of where I would assign things like alt f4 to some of those secondary functions so you are accidentally invoking them all the time and again you would just do that and you would choose secondary function and assign it that way if you want to turn off that macro button functionality you can do that as well so down here where you see the M1 and M2 buttons where it says secondary function you can select those and actually uncheck this set as secondary function box um and then they just become regular buttons that you can map to whatever you want so I actually really like in some games mapping these back buttons to the shoulder buttons because then I can kind of keep my fingers on the triggers and just use my middle finger to use the shoulder button functionality in game that's that's pretty nice um if if you know there are certain games where like you're contorting your hands in weird ways or whatever to get stuff done so a lot of like different functionality there that you can enable another thing uh in this menu you can also go to the sticks and customize the dead zones and the outer thresholds again there is um there is a a bug here where the dead zone isn't registering quite properly we're working on that um the you can customize the triggers so I know some people like to have just a hair trigger in Shooters um or in certain racing games you want to um you know these triggers if you don't want to have to press them down all the way to get Max boost you can turn this down a little bit if you want both triggers to have the exact same range you can check that mirror triggers button down on the bottom and then adjust it like that so that also works uh and finally you can adjust the um intensity of the vibration the haptic feedback that's handy if you are trying to be super stealth um you're trying to play really quietly in a quiet room or if you just you know if it's a little bit too intense for you again you can adjust all of those things on a game by game basis as well if you highlight the game you want to adjust press the x button all of that stuff is right there and you can adjust it for that game specifically which is really really handy we have a great question in chat and that's what's actually the next thing I was going to say is there a legend on the Ally which indicates all the shortcut combinations yes so if you press and hold the Armory crate button that that kind of circular geometric button on the right uh hand side boom you will get a list of all of the functionality in the particular mode that you're in so this is uh for Gamepad mode I believe yeah no this is for desktop mode sorry that's why the stick is left click so yep that will show you everything that you need to know all right now once you are in game there are a few things you may want to know the main one here is this operating mode available again in this Command Center this slide out menu from the triangle button um we have three modes by default they're named the same things as on our laptop silent performance and turbo silent mode operates that Z1 extreme chip at 10 watts performance mode operates it at 15 watts so a little bit more power but like a little less battery life and then turbo mode goes full bore on the power at 25 watts for maximum performance if you are plugged in with the Rog at with the charger that comes with the RG Ally you can get 30 Watts which is like a nice little boost I like to call that like turbo plus mode um if you are using a third-party charger not all of them will necessarily give you that 30 watt boost some will that is also something that we are looking into so stay tuned on that if you want something in between what those modes offer you can go into settings um go to operating mode and choose the manual mode over here to create your own manual mode so for example some people like like an 18 watt manual mode or something like that you can set the SPL to 18. the sppt and fppt are like the boosts it can do for like 10 seconds and two minutes again that's all in the guide written below so you can go check that out in this mode you can also adjust the fan curves to whatever you want again the higher wattage the more you may want those fan curves to boost but you can customize it to your own desires and then that manual mode will also be available in this cycle it says 15 watts on the manual mode label right now I reported that I think that's going to be fixed as well okay even when because even if your manual Mode's not 15 watts it'll say 15 watts and then like that's confusing don't worry it's it's operating it correctly the only thing with manual mode you need to make sure of is that you press this this checkbox here to apply it when you're done creating it or it may not like go through all the way soon all right what's next on the list oh so related tip the command center here where you adjust the operating mode and all these other things all of these tiles are actually configurable if you look an Armory crate in this settings tab up here at the top on the right side you can see this thing that says edit Command Center so you can remove some of these features add some of these features so if I click add here and I want to add more stuff there's a ton of useful stuff in here you can change the aurasync lighting pattern you can change your game visual which like changes like you know the brightness and saturation color profiles of your of your display which I know some people want like you know a shadow boost option in first person shooters or things like that that'll toggle through those I like this led brightness one because that uh sometimes I want to turn the LEDs off if I'm playing in in the dark and they're a little too bright for me and I also like to take screenshot and record screen buttons there those are just kind of Handy um so yeah you can kind of customize this menu to fit your exact needs sorry I'm so quiet on stream guys I'm trying to answer everybody's questions in chat chat it's been very active today in both chats so oh you're in check good well that's good because I can drive this and you can yeah we're trying to we're trying to be quick with this video because we also want it to be available on YouTube for people to be able to watch and scrub through and things like that so we're not answering a ton of questions live right now um I promise um Lucky's in chat as well again join our Discord a lot of questions answered there and again read um the article because a lot of uh tips and stuff in the article that that help people set things up I answer a lot of the questions I'm seeing um that aren't related to like technical issues that people are having with their configuration all right so uh the next thing is once you've kind of optimized all the settings in Armory crate I also recommend optimizing your game settings and I'm not going to display this here but what I am going to do is I'll drop this link in chat and again this is linked to in the article in the video description if you're watching this afterward uh you're going to want to you know a lot of games run great out of the box right but a little bit of tweaking can go a long way with some games especially some of those um like higher power AAA games right we did I did some work for you guys ahead of time and I found uh some optimized settings that give you kind of the best visual experience while staying around like 1080p 60 maybe 1080p like between 40 and 60 for a few games um so that you don't have to fiddle with the settings yourself so uh I just posted that link in chat um that will help you you can kind of just go copy my settings and then use that as a starting point to tweak your own we don't have it for obviously every game out there but we got like 10 different games that we uh kind of went through and tried to optimize if you are getting not getting quite the performance you want in some games try turning the settings down in game um try adjusting different different graphical things some graphic settings may affect your performance more or less than others we're going to be doing a show probably in a few weeks where we go go through the process that that we use to make those optimized settings guys so that you guys have a little bit more knowledge on which settings are the first ones that you should check and things like that but for now we have a few starting points for you in some of the the best games that are out there foreign another so we've talked a lot about visuals right let's talk about audio for a second because this thing comes with Dolby Atmos built in now Dolby Atmos is enabled by default for the speakers kind of giving them a more like spatial sound the speaker sound incredible on this thing um but it it also comes with a license for Dolby Atmos for headphones usually you have to purchase this separately for um I forget it's like five or ten bucks uh but it comes with the RG Ally just like all of our laptops so if you go into the Dolby access app and you go to products you and you plug in your headphones you can turn on Dolby Atmos for headphones which will give you some of that virtual surround sound on your headphones or earbuds very very cool feature that I highly recommend checking out um a small note on this uh there was an issue reported by some users are finding that when running the Ally at low wattages in certain games this the speakers um will like crackle a little bit this is being looked into I haven't experienced it myself but some users not all but some have found that actually disabling Dolby Atmos for the built-in speakers can help or disabling some of the audio features in Armory crate can help it hasn't helped everyone but again we're looking into that so fear not tip number 13 is expand your storage I don't have mine nearby but um two ways you can expand the storage on the Rog Ally comes by default with 512 gigabytes however it's got a little micro SD card slot right there so you can go on Amazon or Newegg or your favorite retailer and buy a Micro SD card pop that in and then you can install games to the micro SD card um it is capable of up to UHS 2 speeds which is really fast like load times are almost as fast as the built-in SSD with some of the highest end micro SD cards you can get today but those cards are only available in in somewhat smaller uh capacities so if you want more capacity you might want to go with a uh S1 card and put all of your like indie games or or AAA games that don't take quite as as long to load in General on there because the loading times can be a little bit slower but I haven't had too much of a problem with it it was actually a really great way to expand the storage on my device quickly and cheap deeply steam is the only launcher where you have to do a little bit of fiddling to get games installed on the SD card you have to go into steam settings and add the SD card as a secondary library in Steam those instructions are in the link in the video description you can also upgrade the SSD we showed how to do this on a a stream which you can watch on YouTube or twitch a week or two ago we did a tear down of the Ally it's extremely easy to install the SSD I highly recommend reading our guide on how to do it there are a couple details in there that you will definitely want to know that I haven't seen covered in some of the other like YouTube guides out there so please read our guide it is linked to in the article um and that is also a great way to expand the storage on your ally when you do so you will have to reinstall Windows there's a cloud recovery functionality on the Ally in the Bios that will let you reinstall windows with all of the drivers and software and all of that stuff intact just like you got it from the factory with a whole terabyte on it all right we're near the end here I promise we tried to keep this under 20 minutes I didn't do a good job I was talking as fast as I can that's okay tip number 14 and 15 these are kind of related so I'll just merge them into one the Ally was designed to be super personal not just a handheld you can play it as a handheld but you could also hook it up to your TV and use it as like a multiplayer console or hook it up to a monitor Mouse a keyboard at your desk and use it as kind of a you know an Esports PC kind of situation as well we sell a gaming charger dock that allows you to charge while also sending an HDMI signal to an external display like a TV or a monitor the only things to keep in mind again there are guides to all of this in that article if you're playing with multiplayer or you're playing with an external controller like an Xbox controller or our rakiri controllers you will need to open the command center and uh click this embedded controller option here you'll need to disable the Allies built-in controller so that it can recognize your external controllers otherwise it's going to want to keep defaulting to this one side note if you find that all of a sudden your controls aren't working on your ally make sure that this feature is not disabled you want to enable that I've seen a lot of people act like just accidentally bump it or something and then wonder why their buttons aren't working so that's a good place to look um if our gaming charger dock allows you to pass through that HDMI signal but you can also get our XG mobile external gpus which will perform the same functions but also boost the performance of The Ally by a crazy amount we currently offer two models one with an AMD Radeon 6850m XT GPU and one with an RTX 4090 laptop GPU inside the XG mobile is great it's very portable you can kind of Bring pop in your bag and bring it with you if you're going on a trip or whatever or you can leave it at your desk and just kind of dock your uh your ally when you come home and play with way way more GPU power it is awesome and that is all the tips that's all the tips I have I was racing through them but that that 25 minutes you just watched should hopefully get you acquainted with all of the basics that you need to know on the Ally to kind of get started playing games and get the the best experience out of it that you can again I know I'm seeing a lot of questions in chat about um some of the the bugs that people have reported we are watching all the discords we are watching all the subreddits we even if you don't see us there we're watching we hear the feature requests we see the bugs that people are reporting and our team is investigating all of them I promise you um so please just just bear with us some I know some people are experiencing things and some aren't um so I you know a lot of people are having a great time with their Ally and some people are uh just waiting on a few fixes yeah there's some bumps there's some bumps but they're bumps that can be fixed easily brand new products and yeah yeah yeah we're jumping into a new space here and uh I'm just excited to see how many people are stoked about this I'm seeing so many peop people posting pictures like oh my gosh this game is so fun I could play it I'm like you know in bed or in the car or whatever like it's really really cool to finally we've had this device for two months really cool to see people finally excite as excited about it as we have been because we've just been waiting to share the love with all of you guys so thank you for joining us today I promise that's it we're done sorry it took a little bit long to get through it all but I promise it was worth it all of those tips will serve you very very well join our Discord there's a lot of other tips happening in there um I know there's third party stuff that people are playing with people are doing mods which you know it's fun to watch even if you don't plan on doing it yourself yeah if you guys have more comments and questions and stuff and you want to hang out tomorrow we're going to be streaming uh same time for three hours on twitch.tv Asus Rog so if there's a lot of burning questions we didn't get to today we're trying to keep this video to a half hour and we're right at that Mark right now so tune in tomorrow 3 P.M to 6 p.m Eastern twitch.tv Asus Rog I'll be playing more Diablo and just answering your questions there hopefully we can help you guys get settled and I'll be given as much support as I can live on that stream as well but guys thanks for tuning in we'll see you tomorrow for our Diablo stream whitson's gonna be on vacation next week enjoy till then ggs take care

Channel: ROG Global

Views: 50,184

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Id: ogaZOZnY6uU

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023