The first of April was the occasion for many brands to make more or less successful jokes. The giant Asus, for its part, took advantage of this day to announce the Asus Rog Ally, a very real competitor to the Steam Deck which has serious arguments to make.
A serious competitor to the Steam Deck
With the launch of the Steam Deck in 2021, Valve won over many gamers by combining the flexibility of a gaming PC with the portability of a Nintendo Switch. Impressive in terms of its value for money, the product is not without flaws and Asus intends to capitalize on its latest with its portable “console”.
First of all, Asus announces a product with twice the performance of the Steam Deck. The Asus Rog Ally features an AMD APU based on the Zen 4 architecture compatible with RDNA 3. It is also lighter and thinner than the Valve Deck and above all offers a better quality screen. The Rog Ally is indeed equipped with a 7 “1080p (16: 9) screen of 500 nits, clocked at 120 Hz.
The other interesting point is that the Rog Ally runs on Windows 11, and is therefore directly compatible with most of your games. In particular, you will be able to enjoy PC Game Pass titles natively and in excellent conditions.
The Steam Deck also allows you to launch PC Game Pass games natively, but only after installing Windows on the machine. Originally, it runs on Linux and requires some knowledge to launch games outside of SteamOS, and only allows access to Xbox Game Pass via the Xbox Cloud Gaming on a browser.
No price or release date
If the Asus Rog Ally has something to make your mouth water on paper, let’s not forget that the real strength of the Steam Deck is its price placement. With its basic version (64 GB) offered at $399, Valve offers excellent value for money to gamers. For its part, Asus simply claimed that the Asus Rog Ally would be “very competitive”, without further details.
According to the first rumors from
Insider Gamingthe console would launch in a 512GB version for $649 (the same price as the 512GB version of the Steam Deck), while a 1TB version would be offered for $899.
At the moment, two YouTube channels offer a preview of the Asus Rog Ally and are very enthusiastic about the product. Although they only had access to a prototype, Dave2D and Linus Tech Tips highlight in particular the performance, the screen and the cooling system of the Rog Ally.
Questions remain, however, such as the autonomy of the product, its launch price and its date of marketing. Details on this subject should be given soon and we will obviously be on the lookout for any official information.
