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Asus has confirmed the price and release date steam Deck opponent.
The Asus ROG Ally will be released on June 13 for $699 / £699.
It’s more expensive than the top-tier Steam Deck, which costs $649 / £569, but promises to be more powerful than Valvepocket.
Originally, announced on April 1, the Asus ROG Ally will run Windows 11 and feature an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme 8-core processor, 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and a 512GB SSD for storage.
Asus ROG Ally product video
The handheld will also feature a 7-inch 1080p touchscreen at up to 120Hz (compared to the Steam Deck’s 1280×800, 60Hz display).
It also boasts a GPU based on AMD’s recently released RDNA 3 architecture, delivering up to 8.6 teraflops of performance (compared to the Steam Deck’s 1.6 teraflops).
As reported Rock Paper Shotguna lower-spec version with a slower Ryzen Z1 processor is also in development, launching in Q3 2023 for $599.
Early hardware reviews show that the laptop does indeed look noticeably more powerful than the Steam Deck, but with a noticeable reduction in battery life as a result.
Review by The Verge says it was able to hit a frame rate of 39fps in its tests Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam Deck, and that in standard performance mode the Asus ROG Ally can hit 48fps.
However, it goes on to note that Ally also has a “turbo” mode that boosts it to 65fps, making it perform significantly better than Steam Deck.
This results in battery life that, according to The Verge, doesn’t come close to the Steam Deck’s runtime. According to his findings, playing a base game like Slay the Spire will get you around 3.5 hours of battery life, while playing something like Elden Ring or The Last of Us Part I in Turbo mode will result in less than an hour of battery life.
Thus, players are told that an Ally may be better than someone who not only plays on the move, but also likely has an outlet nearby.
Valve has been open about potential future iterations of the Steam Deck, which the team says will likely focus on improved battery life rather than hardware like an OLED screen.
In an interview with Famitsu last September, Steam Deck developer Pierre-Lou Griffe stated that battery life was the main thing Valve wanted to improve in the next iteration of Steam Deck.
“We’ve already improved (battery life) from launch to now,” he explained at the time. “For example, we’ve enabled 40Hz refresh rate playback, and we’re working hard to give users more control over how long their battery lasts.”