Asus’ Steam Deck rival, the ROG Ally, is no joke

rockpapershotgun.com:

Asus have confirmed that the ROG Ally, a Steam Deck-esque handheld PC announced on April Fool’s Day, is in fact a real device that’s in production right now. There’s no price or release date info as of yet, but it sounds like it will be more of a premium alternative, aiming to beat the Deck on specs like APU power and display performance.

According to YouTuber Dave2D, whom Asus provided with a early engineering unit, the ROG Ally will be equipped with an AMD Zen 4/RDNA 3 chip - allowing for "comfortably" higher framerates than the Steam Deck - as well as a 120Hz, 1920x1080 screen. It will also run Windows 11, so should sidestep the game compatibility issues that the Deck’s Linux-based SteamOS still faces. Here’s the Asus hype vid, which be warned, has the tacky air of an April Fool’s joke even if it wasn’t one:

Dave2D also claims the ROG Ally’s cooling fans are a lot quieter than the Steam Deck’s, and that it weighs 608g: a good deal lighter than Valve’s 669g handheld. He also successfully hooks it up to an external GPU device, the ROG XG Mobile, though it’s not clear if the ROG Ally will work with non-Asus GPU enclosures as well. Even without one, Asus reckon its newer internals are about twice as powerful as the Steam Deck’s.

Putting aside the deep, burning tedium of April Fool’s stunts, it’s pretty interesting that a big PC hardware player like Asus is getting into handheld PCs. Evidently the Steam Deck’s success has tempted others in a way that more niche handheld brands like Ayaneo never did. And a stronger APU would address one concern I recently put to the Steam Deck’s creators: that it may struggle to run the more graphically intensive games of the future.

At the same time, good questions remain about