ASUS reveals a competitor to Steam Deck

[AGTDenton]

Watched this last night and can't help but be impressed

Looks like ASUS are taking this quite seriously, the performance on a 4K monitor was pretty impressive.

However, I'd expect the £1k+ mark for this. With people happy to spend £1k+ on a phone the market is certainly there



https://www.asus.com/ca-en/site/gami...oles/rog-ally/

EDIT: New Site - https://rog.asus.com/gaming-handheld...rog-ally-2023/

[Rob_B]

Yeah it looks really nice, but will be nowhere close to the SteamDeck price. Asus don't have the "if people buy games we get a cut" income so will charge an arm and a leg for it.

[Jonj1611]

Have to agree on that. Looks nice but price will be nuts.

And as mentioned unlike Steam that make money from the games as well there is no point selling this as a loss leader either

[Saracen999]

Of course they do .... less than a week after I receive my Steamdeck. Figures.

I do seem to remember making the point that maybe the "sale" implied Steamdeck v2 was coming when I posted in the "Sale" thread. I had also seen some .... hints .... that a v2, or at least a v1 refresh with some upgrades, might be 3rd party as it seems Valve are more a platform company than a hardware manufacturer. Haven't watched that LTT vid yet but will, later.

EDIT 1 - Watched it. Interesting.

EDIT 2 - Despite the whinge above, actually, the 512 Steamdeck is about as high a price as I'd go for a handheld console anyway, given that it's more of an indulgence than a heavy use item, so if this Asus is anything significantly more expensive (as the spec suggests is likely) I wouldn't be interested anyway.

[jimbouk]

Looks great, oh Windows 11, erm, maybe I'll pass

No, good to see other people getting in on the idea, hopefully it will be a success and drive a bit more innovation and competition in the market. But yeah, serious money!

[DanceswithUnix]

There are rumours of AMD's upcoming RDNA3 based APUs being pretty awesome. Again, that doesn't mean cheap but it might mean we get some mega gaming handhelds, and not for another year.

[Jonj1611]

I wonder if not being tied to Steam will open it up to games not available on Steam. Granted almost everything is available on Steam but a few things aren't

[DanceswithUnix]

I wonder if not being tied to Steam will open it up to games not available on Steam. Granted almost everything is available on Steam but a few things aren't

It will, but it probably gives a two tier setup.

If I drop £1000 on a handheld, it had probably better be running Windows so I can run every game.

But then if I drop £400 on a handheld, I don't really want 25% of that cost going to a Windows licence when SteamOS is free because then the hardware will have to be so bad it can't run Windows anyway.

[AGTDenton]

I wonder if not being tied to Steam will open it up to games not available on Steam. Granted almost everything is available on Steam but a few things aren't

You would hope so but Steam is still the best for controller support and big screen view, ideal for not using a mouse & keyboard.

It would be great if the likes of Epic & EA could work without kbm. Compared to Steam, the others seem to just see the $$$ roll in and perform minimal changes and no further innovation. They lag behind on functionality by a huge margin

[AGTDenton]

Release date is set to May 11th and Asus is promising a sub $1000 price...

Looks like there is a standard & you guessed it; "Extreme" version to choose from.

Asus has now confirmed the Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA 3 GPU the Ally will be running on as a semi-custom, 6-core, 12-thread SoC known as the Ryzen Z1. It's essentially a cut down version of AMD's recent Ryzen 7 7840U mobile APU, perhaps closer to the Ryzen 5 7640U, and comes sporting a Radeon 780M GPU, just as recent leaks had hinted.

If you want to talk raw GPU performance, the Z1 Extreme can manage up to 8.6 TFLOPS, which is roughly equivalent to a desktop RX 6600 GPU. The standard Z1 chip, however, is only capable of a maximum 2.8 TFLOPS, less than an RX 6400. Though that is still considerably more than the Steam Deck's 1.6 TFLOPS from its Aerith APU.

While we knew the Ally would come with a 7-inch 1080p screen, running at 120Hz, we're now being promised a healthy 7ms response time and AMD FreeSync compatibility, along with a 500 nits peak brightness. It's also sporting Corning Gorilla Glass to keep it safe and comes with DX anti-glare coating.

The closest we got was an Asus representative assuring us that, while the retail price was being held back for a reveal at the May 11 launch event (and will undoubtedly be leaked well ahead of that), "I can tell you for sure that the price will be below $1,000. 200% it will be below $1,000."
That pricing is likely just for the base six-core edition of the Ally, however, as there is surely going to be a second, more expensive version sporting that Ryzen Z1 Extreme eight-core processor. How much more we won't know until the May 11 unveiling in a couple of weeks.

https://www.pcgamer.com/asus-rog-ally-launch-may-11/

[Saracen999]

....

But then if I drop £400 on a handheld, I don't really want 25% of that cost going to a Windows licence when SteamOS is free because .....

Me too. But, I doubt it is that high.

I have no inside info on MS pricing for embedded Winndows (or anything else) but I do know what wa paid to include some other retail software with hardware and it was a LOT lower than anyhing resembling tha retail cost of the same software. That's probably at least partly why they were often hobbled versions, or locked to Brand XYZ hardware.

On those, the payment for such bundled software was more like 10% of retail. But, they shifted a LOT of copies that way. I'd doubt MS is that low, but I doubt it's £100 either, and would suspect a lot lower than that.

[Rob_B]

8.6 > 2.8 TFlops is a huge difference!

780m equivalent is a decent spec (assuming that's the extreme) saw an ETAprime video today where he puts one of those through its paces and it's quite impressive for an APU albeit with a higher end CPU part (7940HS 8C/16T) - https://youtu.be/KKaoxe5dd3M

[DanceswithUnix]

Looks like that Z1 apu will be a general part anyone can build handhelds around:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023...m-deck-clones/

[DanceswithUnix]

Me too. But, I doubt it is that high.

I have no inside info on MS pricing for embedded Winndows (or anything else) but I do know what wa paid to include some other retail software with hardware and it was a LOT lower than anyhing resembling tha retail cost of the same software. That's probably at least partly why they were often hobbled versions, or locked to Brand XYZ hardware.

On those, the payment for such bundled software was more like 10% of retail. But, they shifted a LOT of copies that way. I'd doubt MS is that low, but I doubt it's £100 either, and would suspect a lot lower than that.

I was basing that comment on the way Microsoft had to make a special cut down Windows version to combat the early netbooks running Linux.

OTOH, I always get Dell machines with Windows loaded because it costs the same to buy with Linux. Supposedly there is an overhead at Dell dealing with the lower numbers of Linux machines they sell, and they don't put Fedora on there anyway so I might as well get the Windows licence just in case the machine gets repurposed for Windows.

[Saracen999]

I was basing that comment on the way Microsoft had to make a special cut down Windows version to combat the early netbooks running Linux.

OTOH, I always get Dell machines with Windows loaded because it costs the same to buy with Linux. Supposedly there is an overhead at Dell dealing with the lower numbers of Linux machines they sell, and they don't put Fedora on there anyway so I might as well get the Windows licence just in case the machine gets repurposed for Windows.

We're probably both rather buying a pig in a poke anyway, concerning the licence.

I could have made my argument the other way round. I know what a couple of known-name software houses could (did) charge, and it was a small percentage of retail.

OTOH, they weren't MS, who have .... umm, some significant market share. I'd guess they'll drive a harder deal than relatively unknown software houses. I won't say who the software houses were, because despite it being eons ago, it was commercially sensitive. Suffice to say, our average member here would know them but Joe Public? A bit no doubt, but less so.

The point in your first para is well-teken though. Not least, the cheaper the device the bigger the proportion of it is software, therefore the bigger the impact on combined price if the software costs more or less. And I'm sure guessing what MS can charge.

[Rob_B]

I wonder when dropped to ~15W how they perform vs the Steamdeck? Or to reverse it, how would a 30W Steamdeck APU compete vs a Z1/Z1E ? I can't see batteries keeping up very well for portable gaming with 30W power usage.