The Asus ROG Ally was the primary true Steam Deck challenger; while I’d argue it fell a little short, it legitimately improved the state of inexpensive Home windows handheld gaming with its plugged-in efficiency boosts and clean variable refresh fee display screen. Now, Asus is starting to disclose its successor: the ROG Ally X.
Don’t name it an Ally 2: when it ships within the second half of the 12 months, the Home windows-based Ally X could have the identical AMD Z1 Excessive chipset and the identical 48–120Hz VRR display screen. It’s not fairly like the Steam Deck OLED, the place Valve received AMD to revise its chip for higher battery life and stability and added a bigger, brighter, beautiful new OLED panel with improved response time and slimmer bezels.
“We’re not 30 to 40 % extra capability.”
However the newly black-colored handheld will have a considerable battery life enchancment, Asus SVP Shawn Yen tells The Verge — as a result of Asus will cram a considerably bigger battery pack into the Ally X’s revised shell. “We’re not 30 to 40 % extra capability,” he tells me. “We’re far more than that.”
Asus received’t speak particular specs at this time. As a substitute, Yen asks me how a lot battery life I’d realistically like from a revised handheld. I say I’d need to double the worst-case battery life to a few hours since I’m presently seeing perhaps 1.5 hours in video games. “It received’t disappoint your worst-case state of affairs,” he tells me.
Yen says battery life has been the only greatest request since launch; Asus has seen how the neighborhood generally straps big exterior batteries to their handhelds, although the Ally theoretically had room inside for a bigger battery pack.
“Once we launched [the original Ally], we didn’t have such a transparent understanding that the battery is likely to be one thing individuals want greater than a lighter-weight gadget,” he admits.
Battery isn’t the one change Asus is speaking about at this time; the Ally X is about addressing most of the neighborhood’s high priorities for the right way to revise the unique. “We take into consideration battery and storage, graphics and reminiscence, ports… our purpose is to suit as lots of these as attainable into a tool like this,” says Asus senior product supervisor Gabriel Meng.
Once more, no specs at this time, however Asus says the Ally X ought to now have greater than its present 16GB of RAM so that you could allocate a lot of it to the GPU with out impacting the remainder of the system. It ought to have an extended M.2 2280 SSD slot, so consumers can extra simply discover and buy bigger SSD upgrades than the present M.2 2230 permits.
The Ally X also needs to be much more repairable, with redesigned joystick modules which are extra interchangeable — and upgradable, I think about, if Gulikit steps up? Whereas I didn’t get to see it for myself, Asus says the hand held shall be barely heavier as a result of bigger battery, with revised grips, and slight tuning to issues just like the D-Pad, joysticks, and triggers.
Above: a video displaying the within of the unique ROG Ally.
And, whereas Asus nonetheless won’t admit that the Ally’s SD card reader ever had any fault, tells me it’s the identical precise SD card reader it makes use of in its laptops, and says it doesn’t consider any points truly needed to do with overheating, the Ally X could have a rearranged motherboard structure that sounds prefer it’ll transfer it away from the system’s vents. “We don’t need individuals to suppose that’s what we had to do,” Meng says of shifting the SD reader. “We needed to transfer issues across the board to make them match.”
Asus says the Ally X’s enhancements will come at a value; not like the Steam Deck OLED, which largely changed Valve’s LCD mannequin on the identical worth factors, the Ally X will begin at a better worth than the unique. The unique 2023 ROG Ally will even proceed to stay round and might even see reductions.
So far as a ROG Ally 2 goes, Asus agrees that it has a similar philosophy to Valve: it needs to construct a real successor when it could possibly supply a big efficiency increase, not simply an incremental one.
And whereas Asus doesn’t plan to promote an aftermarket battery improve for authentic Ally consumers it has a giant software program replace coming for these consumers as properly: Armory Crate SE 1.5 just isn’t solely a really contemporary coat of paint and navigation enhancements, it’ll lastly let gamers share their button mappings for numerous video games with different Ally homeowners.
Asus tells me it nonetheless believes in Home windows. Whereas Meng says, “We’re very open-minded to different options,” and that the corporate does have conversations with Valve, Asus says it has philosophical and logistical causes to stay with Microsoft’s OS, together with a want to have the “inclusiveness of all totally different recreation platforms” as an alternative of counting on Steam. I’ll let you know about among the logistical causes in a future story.