Beware the ASUS ROG Ally Reviews

The Importance of Software and Support in the Steam Deck Experience

When it comes to gaming on a handheld device like the Steam Deck, there are several factors that can make or break the experience. One of the most important elements is software, specifically Windows 11 and the user interface (UI) that comes with it. The author of this article notes that while the UI is an improvement over its initial version, it still has some issues, particularly for users who are not familiar with Windows.

The author's personal experience with the Steam Deck is a good example of this. They downloaded and installed Street Fighter 6, a game that was not validated at launch, but were able to get it running easily after just two clicks. However, when they booted up the device, they had to navigate through various settings and adjustments in order to get the game running smoothly. This process can be overwhelming for users who are not comfortable with technology, and it's easy to see why someone might give up on using a device like this.

In contrast, the author notes that playing Street Fighter 6 was a great gaming experience once they were able to get past the initial setup issues. However, they also acknowledge that the process of getting the game running was difficult to navigate, even for someone who is comfortable with technology. This highlights the importance of user-friendly software and support in creating a positive experience for users.

The author also notes that while Valve supports the Steam Deck well, particularly in terms of customer service and repairability, there are still some issues with the product itself. For example, they mention that Microsoft Office is installed on the device by default, which can be frustrating for users who don't need it. This highlights the importance of providing options for users to customize their experience.

One of the most significant advantages of the Steam Deck is its ability to run a wide range of games, including AAA titles like Street Fighter 6. However, the author notes that this comes with some compromises in terms of performance and graphics quality. For example, they mention that the device runs at 60-90 frames per second, which is lower than the 120 frames per second that some more powerful devices can achieve.

Despite these limitations, the Steam Deck remains an attractive option for gamers who want to play high-quality games on a portable device. The author notes that the device has a massive community of users and developers, which will continue to support it with mods and accessories over time. However, they also express concern about what will happen when Valve decides to release a new version of the Steam Deck.

In particular, the author is concerned that if Asus were to release a sequel to the device, it might be treated as an afterthought by the company. This could lead to reduced support and updates for the original device, which would be disappointing given its popularity and the positive experience that many users have had with it. The author concludes by encouraging Asus to continue supporting the Steam Deck over time, particularly if they plan to release a new version of the device in the future.

Overall, the software and support on the Steam Deck are crucial elements of the user experience. While there may be some limitations and compromises, the device has many advantages that make it an attractive option for gamers who want to play high-quality games on a portable device. With continued support from Valve and Asus, the Steam Deck has the potential to become one of the best handheld gaming devices on the market.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enalmost every Rog Ally review that's come out over the past couple weeks has been flawed and it's not through any fault of the creators or the Publications it was Asus because they sent out review units they just were not ready to be reviewed these things were running drivers and firmware that were so underbaked and when I started my review on this thing I I almost did it right I went through the process and I was like something's wrong like these numbers aren't where they should be so I contacted Asus and I was like this doesn't add up man these things are these things should be doing better and they said just wait there's firmers and drivers coming out and so I did so over the past couple weeks I was sent a bunch of updates but the one I got a couple days ago just hit different because now this product is like 15 or 20 better than it was on day one so let's take a look at some numbers if you look at this graph here the yellow bars represent the data that I collected from the Rog Ally on day one like running the original firmware and you can see it's a decent performer if you compare it to the steam deck for the most part it's better but not by a lot and the weird thing the thing that like threw all the red flags for me was I also had access to this product the ionio 2s and the chip that's in here the 7840u is very similar to the chip that's in the Ally the Z1 extreme but you can tell right those yellow bars are quite different from the Red Bar in a lot of games it's just like outperforming the Ally by a significant margin so that's when I was like this doesn't it doesn't make sense right this shouldn't be underperforming like this but the new firmware check this out this is so much better like right across the board now this was the 15 watt profile the performance mode kind of Middle Ground there was a higher wattage profile called the turbo mode that's 25 watts and if you look at the chart here it's the same thing this new firmware it's represented by the green there it's just a better performer and the thing is you'd only be able to get these frame rates on the latest driver it just feels so unfortunate that Asus sent out all these review units to so many reviewers and they're just it seems like all of that work that those reviewers did and the Publications did it's almost worthless now because of this change like I feel like Asus really should have dropped this stuff from day one now if you look at the last profile here this is the nine watt profile so this is the they call it the silent mode so on day one the RG Ally was a comically underperforming device it was actually concerning to a lot of people that it was underperforming worse than a steam deck you can tell though that the new firmware it's better but it still pales in comparison to what the steam deck can do at nine watts and I think there's a reason for it so the first thing I'd want to just push into your mind is that I don't think this is going to get much better I actually think that the nine watt or like the low wattage performance that you're seeing right now is pretty much as good as it's gonna get on the Rog Ally and the reason for it is simply because the chip that's in here was derived from a laptop like the 7840u that's the thing inside here uh very similar to the Z1 extreme that's in here it's a chip that was designed to run from like 15 to 30 watts and all the optimizations and validation and tweaking that was done for it by the AMD Engineers is built for that wattage range it's awesome but the moment you stick it into a handheld device that can can make use of ultra low wattage you lose a lot of power efficiency which differs drastically from what the steam deck was this is running a custom chip that was designed to run from 3 to 15 watts so it's got that it's covering that low range right so when you go to nine Watts it's built it's like smack dab in the middle it's built for it so this is uh Spider-Man it's running at 33 34 frames per second at full wattage but you can drop it down to three Watts three Watts uh it runs terribly it's now at six frames per second this is unplayable at this point my Lord but it can right it can go that low now you obviously don't drop your TDP to three watts to be able to play Spider-Man at six frames per second you're doing it so you can play the undemanding titles at high frame rates while still having crazy long battery life so this is Nomad survival you can get 60 frames per second at 3 Watts the Ally can't do that um okay so I want to move this conversation onto just a couple of thoughts that I've had about the RG alley first is the wattage consumption so this pulls like I mentioned 25 watts at the top end if you're running it on battery the steam deck pulls 15 at the top and because of that battery life can be quite different so if you have both of these systems running at 15 watts each they're actually fairly similar but you can really milk the battery life on the steam deck if you're playing some very undemanding games a couple things I want to mention about the battery on the RG Ally so first the fast charging is awesome so you can fill this thing up to like 70 80 battery in like 35 40 minutes it's very fast way faster than the charging on the steam deck but the other thing I thought was kind of neat is that you can set the maximum charge limit on the device to 80 and the purpose of it is to extend the longevity or like the whole like battery health of the product so that you know years later this thing will just have better battery health because it wasn't going to full charge each time uh and yeah it's a neat feature to think every handheld should have and Asus being Asus has it uh now the screen so this I mean it's an awesome screen it goes up to 1080p 120 hertz but if you'll notice most of the benchmarking that I did was at 720p and it's because most of the AAA titles out there will never be able to take advantage of 10dp let alone 1080p at 120 hertz so you're often just playing either Indie titles like 2D games if you want to see 120 frames per second most AAA games will be running at 60 to maybe 90 frames per second now I want to move this conversation over to what I would argue is one of the most important elements of this product the software and the support but first software so this is running Windows 11 and it's got a piece of software from Asus called Armory crates that is supposed to give it a more intuitive experience for the gamer and it does an okay job it's a lot better now than it was on day one but it can still be off full at times because it's Windows a real simple example Street Fighter 6 it's a game that's not validated it's like a demo right now but it's not validated for the steam deck but I've installed it on here and literally I download it and within two clicks I'm playing I'm in the game everything works exactly the way that it should now in this device I downloaded on Steam and I boot it up it has issues with vsync I have to change the resolution I have to change graphical settings I have to adjust the controls I have to go into through so much stuff I got to jump through hoops be able to get this thing running now I'm someone who's very comfortable on Windows but there's something about the experience and I was like this like after seven minutes I was in and it was a great gaming experience but when I was setting it up I thought to myself this is crazy like if I gave this product to an eight-year-old kid like my son he would never have been able to figure that out like even if I had steam installed and the game would be like yo get Street Fighter 6 he would have given up after 20 minutes and like it doesn't run Dad it doesn't work on this thing but on the steam deck he would instantly he'd be in the game he would have figured it out and there's something about this that is difficult to convey as a reviewer because everyone's kind of view on this is different right for some people the burden of Windows is too much to handle and I get it but I have to remind you that the reason why we buy these systems the reason why we use a handheld gaming device is not to navigate through the UI and buy games and to look for stuff it's really to play games and the in-game experience like once you're in games it's awesome there's no doubt in my mind that this is a better game experience than the steam deck for the vast majority of games uh but if you're not comfortable with that stuff and you just want to avoid it at all cost like if you're a Mac User and you're not familiar with Windows you're gonna hate the Ally I think that those all those pop-ups and all the window stuff kills it and the fact that and a lot of it is Windows but the fact that there's like Microsoft Office installed on this thing why Asus get rid of it man this is a gaming device people are not gonna be using office on this thing it should be clean same with McAfee get that out of here man um okay last thing the support and I don't mean just like the support from the company valve obviously supports this product very well both in terms of like customer service uh repairability and like all that stuff there's a very well supported product but the thing that comes to mind is that this product here steam deck this is a product that's meant to last several years like they're not coming out with a steam deck 2 anytime soon they've gone on record with that right and so for like for all the companies that support this thing with like mods and accessories it makes sense to just right you you have a product that's going to last several years the the support and the community around it is massive and it will stay massive because that's valve okay this is a product as awesome as it is it's made by a company that's really good at selling hardware and ideally selling you Hardware frequently right Asus wants people to buy these things and so they can make money from it but if they have a new version of this product if the Ally 2 comes out I don't know a year or two years from now I fear that this thing will just be shelved by Asus in terms of the support and it doesn't deserve that this is such an awesome product and I feel like Asus if you watch this video you have to support this thing you've shown awesome support for it so far great communication with the audience and just like you guys are really supporting this at launch but I think if you can keep that up over time this will be an amazing device that will just literally be better than any other windows handheld on the market better than this stuff as long as you keep the support up okay there you have it the RG Ally foreignalmost every Rog Ally review that's come out over the past couple weeks has been flawed and it's not through any fault of the creators or the Publications it was Asus because they sent out review units they just were not ready to be reviewed these things were running drivers and firmware that were so underbaked and when I started my review on this thing I I almost did it right I went through the process and I was like something's wrong like these numbers aren't where they should be so I contacted Asus and I was like this doesn't add up man these things are these things should be doing better and they said just wait there's firmers and drivers coming out and so I did so over the past couple weeks I was sent a bunch of updates but the one I got a couple days ago just hit different because now this product is like 15 or 20 better than it was on day one so let's take a look at some numbers if you look at this graph here the yellow bars represent the data that I collected from the Rog Ally on day one like running the original firmware and you can see it's a decent performer if you compare it to the steam deck for the most part it's better but not by a lot and the weird thing the thing that like threw all the red flags for me was I also had access to this product the ionio 2s and the chip that's in here the 7840u is very similar to the chip that's in the Ally the Z1 extreme but you can tell right those yellow bars are quite different from the Red Bar in a lot of games it's just like outperforming the Ally by a significant margin so that's when I was like this doesn't it doesn't make sense right this shouldn't be underperforming like this but the new firmware check this out this is so much better like right across the board now this was the 15 watt profile the performance mode kind of Middle Ground there was a higher wattage profile called the turbo mode that's 25 watts and if you look at the chart here it's the same thing this new firmware it's represented by the green there it's just a better performer and the thing is you'd only be able to get these frame rates on the latest driver it just feels so unfortunate that Asus sent out all these review units to so many reviewers and they're just it seems like all of that work that those reviewers did and the Publications did it's almost worthless now because of this change like I feel like Asus really should have dropped this stuff from day one now if you look at the last profile here this is the nine watt profile so this is the they call it the silent mode so on day one the RG Ally was a comically underperforming device it was actually concerning to a lot of people that it was underperforming worse than a steam deck you can tell though that the new firmware it's better but it still pales in comparison to what the steam deck can do at nine watts and I think there's a reason for it so the first thing I'd want to just push into your mind is that I don't think this is going to get much better I actually think that the nine watt or like the low wattage performance that you're seeing right now is pretty much as good as it's gonna get on the Rog Ally and the reason for it is simply because the chip that's in here was derived from a laptop like the 7840u that's the thing inside here uh very similar to the Z1 extreme that's in here it's a chip that was designed to run from like 15 to 30 watts and all the optimizations and validation and tweaking that was done for it by the AMD Engineers is built for that wattage range it's awesome but the moment you stick it into a handheld device that can can make use of ultra low wattage you lose a lot of power efficiency which differs drastically from what the steam deck was this is running a custom chip that was designed to run from 3 to 15 watts so it's got that it's covering that low range right so when you go to nine Watts it's built it's like smack dab in the middle it's built for it so this is uh Spider-Man it's running at 33 34 frames per second at full wattage but you can drop it down to three Watts three Watts uh it runs terribly it's now at six frames per second this is unplayable at this point my Lord but it can right it can go that low now you obviously don't drop your TDP to three watts to be able to play Spider-Man at six frames per second you're doing it so you can play the undemanding titles at high frame rates while still having crazy long battery life so this is Nomad survival you can get 60 frames per second at 3 Watts the Ally can't do that um okay so I want to move this conversation onto just a couple of thoughts that I've had about the RG alley first is the wattage consumption so this pulls like I mentioned 25 watts at the top end if you're running it on battery the steam deck pulls 15 at the top and because of that battery life can be quite different so if you have both of these systems running at 15 watts each they're actually fairly similar but you can really milk the battery life on the steam deck if you're playing some very undemanding games a couple things I want to mention about the battery on the RG Ally so first the fast charging is awesome so you can fill this thing up to like 70 80 battery in like 35 40 minutes it's very fast way faster than the charging on the steam deck but the other thing I thought was kind of neat is that you can set the maximum charge limit on the device to 80 and the purpose of it is to extend the longevity or like the whole like battery health of the product so that you know years later this thing will just have better battery health because it wasn't going to full charge each time uh and yeah it's a neat feature to think every handheld should have and Asus being Asus has it uh now the screen so this I mean it's an awesome screen it goes up to 1080p 120 hertz but if you'll notice most of the benchmarking that I did was at 720p and it's because most of the AAA titles out there will never be able to take advantage of 10dp let alone 1080p at 120 hertz so you're often just playing either Indie titles like 2D games if you want to see 120 frames per second most AAA games will be running at 60 to maybe 90 frames per second now I want to move this conversation over to what I would argue is one of the most important elements of this product the software and the support but first software so this is running Windows 11 and it's got a piece of software from Asus called Armory crates that is supposed to give it a more intuitive experience for the gamer and it does an okay job it's a lot better now than it was on day one but it can still be off full at times because it's Windows a real simple example Street Fighter 6 it's a game that's not validated it's like a demo right now but it's not validated for the steam deck but I've installed it on here and literally I download it and within two clicks I'm playing I'm in the game everything works exactly the way that it should now in this device I downloaded on Steam and I boot it up it has issues with vsync I have to change the resolution I have to change graphical settings I have to adjust the controls I have to go into through so much stuff I got to jump through hoops be able to get this thing running now I'm someone who's very comfortable on Windows but there's something about the experience and I was like this like after seven minutes I was in and it was a great gaming experience but when I was setting it up I thought to myself this is crazy like if I gave this product to an eight-year-old kid like my son he would never have been able to figure that out like even if I had steam installed and the game would be like yo get Street Fighter 6 he would have given up after 20 minutes and like it doesn't run Dad it doesn't work on this thing but on the steam deck he would instantly he'd be in the game he would have figured it out and there's something about this that is difficult to convey as a reviewer because everyone's kind of view on this is different right for some people the burden of Windows is too much to handle and I get it but I have to remind you that the reason why we buy these systems the reason why we use a handheld gaming device is not to navigate through the UI and buy games and to look for stuff it's really to play games and the in-game experience like once you're in games it's awesome there's no doubt in my mind that this is a better game experience than the steam deck for the vast majority of games uh but if you're not comfortable with that stuff and you just want to avoid it at all cost like if you're a Mac User and you're not familiar with Windows you're gonna hate the Ally I think that those all those pop-ups and all the window stuff kills it and the fact that and a lot of it is Windows but the fact that there's like Microsoft Office installed on this thing why Asus get rid of it man this is a gaming device people are not gonna be using office on this thing it should be clean same with McAfee get that out of here man um okay last thing the support and I don't mean just like the support from the company valve obviously supports this product very well both in terms of like customer service uh repairability and like all that stuff there's a very well supported product but the thing that comes to mind is that this product here steam deck this is a product that's meant to last several years like they're not coming out with a steam deck 2 anytime soon they've gone on record with that right and so for like for all the companies that support this thing with like mods and accessories it makes sense to just right you you have a product that's going to last several years the the support and the community around it is massive and it will stay massive because that's valve okay this is a product as awesome as it is it's made by a company that's really good at selling hardware and ideally selling you Hardware frequently right Asus wants people to buy these things and so they can make money from it but if they have a new version of this product if the Ally 2 comes out I don't know a year or two years from now I fear that this thing will just be shelved by Asus in terms of the support and it doesn't deserve that this is such an awesome product and I feel like Asus if you watch this video you have to support this thing you've shown awesome support for it so far great communication with the audience and just like you guys are really supporting this at launch but I think if you can keep that up over time this will be an amazing device that will just literally be better than any other windows handheld on the market better than this stuff as long as you keep the support up okay there you have it the RG Ally foreign\n"