isn’t the Deck also just like… better than those devices? like obviously they have more compute power and whatnot but everything i read about the ASUS one was that the extra hardware power meant nothing when everything was bogged down by Windows and other issues
The main problem with any sort of discussion like this is that “better” is going to mean different things to different people.
Is the one with longer battery life better?
Is the one with more powerful hardware better?
Is the one with trackpads better?
Is the one that can play non-Steam games with less hassle better, even if its UX is overall clunkier?
Is the one with a smoother UX better, even if you might not be able to play every single game you own on it?
Deck is going to be better in some ways for some people, and the Ally (et al.) will be better in some ways for other people. At the end of the day, the entire market segment is better for all of us because competing devices exist. Trying to turn this into a zero-sum turf war is only going to be detrimental to everyone. (Not saying that that’s what you are doing, just speaking in general about what tends to happen when comparisons like this get brought up.)
Yeah, honestly I pre-ordered the Deck and felt like it was a real gamble at the time. Like, “no way it’s going to be able to play many major titles - especially given the dearth of AAA games on Linux - but I want to support the idea and am willing to give it a shot”.
Then I got it and frankly I was amazed, not just at what portable hardware can do but also at the amount of work Valve has contributed towards the software side, Proton in particular. A year since I got it and award-winning AAA games run nicely. Not always out-the-gate but that’s an issue for many systems.
Even if the Ally is better hardware (and I can’t say one way or the other) Valve was the first to make a real investment in a hardware ecosystem for real portable PC gaming (no, I’m not counting cheap Chinese systems running dodgy software).
Also, kudos to AMD for the chip powering the thing, as it’s a pretty damn good balance between power output and consumption.
Same, I saw it as a gamble. I set my preorder, and saved up for the following months until the device released.
I had been looking into this space for years wishing it would get better and cheaper. It’s the only thing that I have been willing to preorder and be a “beta” tester for in several years
The OS makes the steam deck better than any other handheld since all the others just ship with windows and I cannot imagine using windows on a gaming handheld like this. Yes I would love it if my deck had USB4 andother fun up to date hardware, but the OS is the best part about it for now anyway.
The OS makes the steam deck better than any other handheld
Agreed, but with the addition of “for me” at the end there. What makes it better for you and me is going to be a drawback for someone who only plays, say, Destiny 2, Fortnite, or things that are on Game Pass Ultimate.
Yeah, that theoretical person is going to have an absolute garbage time navigating the OS itself, but that’s what they have to put up with to be able to play the games they want on a handheld PC. They might very well find that trade-off worthwhile, and it’s not for us to tell them they’re wrong.
Thats what remote play is for. If you wanna play those games seriously then maybe just keep using your computer.
The Ally is better at all the things that don’t really matter, in my opinion.
in my opinion.
That being the key phrase.
My opinion pretty much aligns with yours, but the point is that no one can make sweeping objective statements about which is better (like this article and so many others try to do) since different things matter to different people. A variety of different options in the market is only a good thing.
Sure I understand and agree with you. I was just elaborating.
Performance on the Ally is incredible. I benchmarked the CPU against my 5900X desktop and the Ally won (single threaded)!
It’s all down to the awful software experience. Every time I pick it up, there’s something annoying about it. Armoury crate has crashed, the battery died while it was sleeping, it doesn’t recognize controller input, it hasn’t detected a game is running and is still in power saving mode, it’s being finicky about the USB-C adapter and throttling (only the included adapter seems to work, anything else, including 100W and PPS etc. adapters say they aren’t powerful enough), the RGB lights are freaking out, it needs a restart. It’s just perpetual troubleshooting and annoyance.
When it works, it’s amazing. The whole experience is gorgeous. It’s super fast, the display is smooth, etc.
Combined with the microsd card overhearing issues, I just don’t think it’s a good purchase. I’ll definitely be sending mine back.
How is the sleep/resume functionality? I’ve heard mixed reports about Windows-based handhelds ranging anywhere from “it doesn’t have anything like that” to “it works perfectly fine just like Deck/Switch”.
That is pretty much the killer feature of the Deck for me, and as far as I’m currently aware, that’s enabled by it using Linux/SteamOS. If I can’t sleep/resume a game on a handheld, I’d be much more inclined to just play on my desktop and reap the benefits of improved performance and graphics.
Ya, I’ve had it work once or twice where it just comes back and the game is able to resume. Generally though, the system is either dead or shut down or hibernating and not usable. I generally don’t even try and use the suspend option. I save and exit out of the game to avoid messing up my save games.
It absolutely does not work as well as the Switch. It’s one of the various constant annoyances of using the Ally.
Me too, I always ask about this, and this is always suspiciously missing from every single review. I assume it just doesn’t work, otherwise we would have seen someone mention it, the steam deck’s reviews all mentioned that since it’s one of (if not the) most important feature for a handheld. For example (just rewatched it to be sure) LTT’s review doesn’t mention that on the ROG, but on the Deck the quote is
[About the sleep and come back to game feature] An Xbox, sure, but I would like to see a Windows PC do that.
So even back then they acknowledged that windows was not capable at that time of doing that (remember they had other handhelds at the time), but they never brought it up on the ROG review, which is very suspicious, almost as if Asus is trying to find a fix and preventing reviewers from talking about it. But that might be too much time hat on my side.
I don’t typically trust LTT reviews anymore. Omissions like that - and no follow-ups for it - lead me to believe they’re just advertisers in tech people’s clothing.
ETA Prime can likewise be a bit light on criticism at times.
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I was talking about the Ally, not the steam deck.
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This sounds like the PC experience to me but handheld. If it’s windows it’s an automatic deal breaker for me.
Steam deck definitely went the switch route. Simple user experience. Lower end spec so games can standardise towards it.
I just can’t believe that they expect people who bought the Ally to interface with the regular ass Win11 desktop without touchpads. Sure, horsepower and a better display is cool, but not at the expense of battery life and heat. I hope it’s successful so we get revisions and incentive for others to get in the game, but it it’s not quite there for me.
Has anyone put steamOS onto an Ally yet? I think Windows will eventually come to the party with a decent mobile version tailored towards games, but until then I cant think of anything worse than windows on such a small screen without a better interface than just joysticks and buttons.
While not the official Steam OS, which Valve still hasn’t released officially, people have thrown Arch on one to do benchmarking comparisons and there are tutorials for getting Linux on it.
Huh, I didnt realise this iteration of steamOS hadn’t released. I remember tinkering with the distro they released (probably in alpha/beta) back in the day when steam machines were going to be a thing,
They switched from a Debian based OS to an Arch based immutable fork for the Deck. There are folks who have built a close version to SteamOS 3, but there would be no need if Valve would just release the official OS. I can’t imagine why they haven’t. It would only make it cheaper for other hardware manufacturers to release a product. I don’t know how much of the Ally’s price is just covering the Windows license, but it has to be a substantial percentage of the overall retail price.
So i can fetch AUR packages on the Steam Deck?
Not out of the box. You don’t have sudo privileges on the SteamOS 3. Valve made an immutable fork of Arch for stability and to dissuade unskilled folks from punching stuff into the terminal that might cause customer service nightmares.
I think the main selling point of the Ally is Windows though.
There are plenty of people who are scared to touch linux, even with a nice launcher on top that does everything for you if you are happy with a vanilla experience. I personally know people, in their 30s as well, who said a while back that they would rather wait for a windows handheld for “stability”. They havent picked up an Ally though.
It’s an immutable filesystem fork of Arch, not vanilla Arch. It’s as stable as any operating system is, doesn’t update in the same way Arch does, and doesn’t even allow the user sudo privilege. Also, you don’t even need to interface with Linux. The front end is extremely intuitive, but you also have the option of a pretty great KDE Plasma desktop mode if you switch over. Fortunately, it has no Candy Crush, Teams, or Cortana in the Start Menu.
I have both and even with all of the Ally’s jank I’ll take the Ally over the Deck any day. The extra hardware power and the VRR screen means the games I play are silky smooth.
I honestly can’t go back to the Deck.
Choice in this market is good for end users, as is competition. Both of the machines are a compromise in one way or another and different in substantial ways, so it’s really just down to personal preference. I can’t wait to see how this market grows over the next few years.
Can you suspend and go back to the middle of the game on the ally? If so would you mind uploading a video of it to YouTube since no one credible mentions of it’s possible and people who claim it is never provide any evidence of it?
If I can find some time, I’ll record it and reply to you with a link.
You really can, but it’s jank just like the rest of the Ally. The sleep mode is totally borked with some games. It just wakes up a few minutes later and starts draining the battery.
For example, I started a game of Minecraft Dungeons last week and put it to sleep. It kept waking back up, but even after it ran out of power, the game was still running when I turned it back on after charging it a few days later.
There’s also a setting that makes the Ally hibernate after a bit of time in sleep (not sure how long the time is) by default, but that needs the sleep to actually sleep or it’ll just run out of power beforehand.
With that being said, the performance of already-running games after the device comes back from hibernation is pretty bad. If I had to guess, it might be because it has to re-upload all the textures to the APU which is technically distinct from the CPU thanks to it being more of a PC than a console? But that’s pure speculation.
Thanks for the reply, although a video would be cool just because no one has shown it, what you described is exactly what I expected, i.e. it doesn’t work in any meaningful way. That’s the way it has always been, windows sleep/hibernate is not meant to go back to a game because that involves more stuff than just RAM status. Most programs are not constantly doing stuff, so they can be interrupted at any point, games unfortunately need to be interrupted in a point where they can, not to mention dealing with the fact that you possibly have a frame that took hours to render depending on how the engine counts time. What Valve did is a huge achievement, because games for consoles have signals they receive asking them to prepare to be suspended, but the same game on PC would not have that. Valve had to do a generic way to pause any game, at any point, and they nailed it, I’m amazed that people seemed to have realised how huge that was when the deck came out, but every new portable with slightly more horsepower gets praised when it can’t do the most basic thing a portable console should be able to.
I’ve reached the point where “better” mostly means “smoothest experience.” That might include not crashing and low overhead. That almost certainly includes a smooth and predictable UI. That means a well thought out system design that balances performance considerations with size and weight, battery life, controller layout, and little things like fan noise.
Honestly, I’m fine with my Switch. It was my first handheld, and I appreciate the variety of games as well as the convenience. I ordered the steam deck because I have a massive library of unplayed or unfinished games on steam, and it seemed like the right way to go for that. I have a windows PC that is still sitting wrapped by movers and never unpacked.
For my “It just works” low water mark, the Deck looked like my best bet for non-switch gaming, and maybe now I can get past the first town on RDR2.
Forbes blogger misses the point completely. News at 11.
Here’s the thing, horsepower means nothing if that’s the only thing the device has. People don’t want just raw performance, there are other soft factors in play, like comfort, convenience, build quality, easy of use, etc. The simple fact that the competitors come with Windows and have no trackpads is already a major turn-off, this by itself makes them inferior products, since Windows notoriously bad with touch-screens, especially when said screen is as small as 7", then there’s the windows updates… Ughh…
Then the compatibility issue. Sure, in theory Windows should be more compatible, in practice… try to run some really old games, like the author casually mentioned. Many will run better with Proton then on Windows itself, if you can make them run at all. Linux already have two excellent library managers, Lutris and Heroic, that make installing non-steam games easier than in Windows, without the need of several resource hogging launchers constantly on the background, so it’s a moot point.
Sure, some multiplayer games don’t run because of the anti-cheat software, but then again, is this really such an issue ? My answer is a big fat NO ! Why ? One word: Gyroscope. Or the lack thereof. Of all 3 devices mentioned in the article, ROG Ally, AyaNeo 2S and Steam Deck, only the deck has it, and guess what, it’s pretty freaking hard to aim properly with sticks in shooter games. Without a gyro, the Ally the 2S players will always be at a disadvantage, which makes the whole endeavor an exercise in frustration, so why bother ?
All in all, a pretty bad, even trollish article. Pretty much what I learned to expect from those Forbes bloggers.
have no trackpads
Exactly. The Ally is available in my country (and with discounts I can get it cheaper than the equivalent Steam Deck even), but no track pads is a huge huge minus. I play a lot of games that use a mouse, why’d I want something that has inferior mouse support?
This alone is the reason I won’t consider it. We’re talking about PC games. The mouse is important. Gtfo with joysticks only.
Moreover, more performance in a portable device is often a trade-off. The board will draw more power, reducing battery life, and it will often generate more heat, requiring more ventilation / fan power which might also further affect battery life (and potentially, its lifespan). You end up paying more for a worse experience, imho.
The new Ayaneo needs a battery that’s more than twice the capacity of the Steam Deck in order to be able to even compare to the Steam Deck in autonomy… if Valve launched a revision of the deck with an updated battery it would be a huge improvement, likely doubling its runtime, it’s much more efficient than the competition in its power usage.
I’d much prefer games start being designed for low spec devices. What I want is more innovative gameplay and interesting mechanics… if the game wastes immense amounts of power for easthetic reasons, it doesn’t make me want to get a portable powerhouse of a console, what it makes me want to do is skip playing that unoptimized game.
The Ally and AyaNeo 2S both have gyroscopes, although the Ally suffers from a profound lack of first party software support and so far users are having to use two layers of input mapping software to get practical use out of them.
This sounds like a weird vendetta with a bunch of random nit picks. The Steam Deck certainly isn’t perfect, but the value at the price is pretty much best in market and there are higher end options for those who want to spend more
Lol Forbes.com is definitely where I go to read about gaming handhelds.
I love how the author went from “these units are technically better than the deck” to “I guess if the deck had the same build problems as these other handhelds, they’d be more forgiving”.
Better specs mean dick if your build quality is shit.
Hard disagree. Steam Deck is good because it fills a niche that no other handheld PC fulfills. You can’t really nitpick when there isn’t really any competitors.
The Deck isn’t the most powerful, its display isn’t the best, it isn’t the cheapest. What people like the author seem to miss is that the Deck wasn’t marketed to be the most powerful, or the best display, or the cheapest. It was designed to balance all these design considerations, such that even though it’s not best at anything, it’s not bad at anything either. That’s really the allure of the Deck for me, that I don’t really need to work around any limitations
Yeah I dont get the sentiment at all. If it was trash and couldn’t run anything it wouldn’t sell. But it’s not, and it runs damn near everything, even if some higher end games will destroy the battery in 25 minutes, it’ll be a great 25 minutes. You can also stop at any point in any game and just come back later and it resumes seamlessly, almost instantaneously, and with next to no battery loss. I’m not being sarcastic, I’ve never had ANY game system that can do that. The closest is the PS5 with rest mode but it’s still way behind ateamdeck in wake up time. It’s a first gen release and it’s capable of things no other console (maybe switch - I don’t actually know, I don’t have one) handheld or otherwise, has been able to do.
Like love or hate valve all you want, but there’s really not a lot to shit on the steam deck about. It’s had like three competitors come out and two most people already forgot exist (Logitech something, and some other one). The Asus one seems capable but is bottlenecked by using windows. Let’s not forget Google’s attempt at a revolutionary gaming product.
To be fair, the logitech G Cloud was never going to be a competitor to the deck, since it’s not made to run things on the bare metal
Just because it isn’t a real competitor doesn’t mean that it wasn’t meant to be one. It was developed targeting what Logitech thought would be the biggest use case for deck, which was playing games that could be streamed, and have other hardware do the bulk of the lifting. The problem is that deck can also do that, and does it better. It was probably a fairly low effort cash grab by Logitech, but they still made it and sunk a ton of R&D costs into getting it out near the deck release.
It was probably developed directly in response to the deck being announced, in order to compete in an open market. If it wasn’t directly in response, then they still felt strongly enough that it would compete that they didn’t cut their losses after the deck was announced.
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Valve is a “good guy” only when you consider that everyone else in the room are damn near comically evil villains. Valve is decent when compared to that, but they also still do shit like the CSGO market soooo
What’s wrong with a game thats always been free to play having in game purchases? Its not like you need them to play it.
It was originally 15 USD, the f2p was in 2018. But it’s had the lootbox bullshit since before it was cool to hate on it. (2013)
Oh I thought it was always free. Blizzard pulled that shit on me with SC2 I paid 60 bucks for then 10 years later they made it free to play but put the campaign behind a paywall.
I kind of agree but you also have to consider the industry that Valve is in and the plethora of anti-consumerism taking place right now.
Valve could have made the Steam Deck with a proprietary OS. They could have locked you into big picture mode and/or locked the bootloader like so many Android and Nintendo devices. They could have done everything in their power to ensure you can’t install GoG or Epic games. They could have glued the SteamDeck together and serialized all the parts together so you could never replace any of them.
And you know what? No one would have batted an eye because that’s what society has come to expect in this day and age, and far too many fucking people will tolerate and accept it.
Instead they went out of their way to build it on a FOSS OS, even going so far as to add the “exit to desktop” right into the GUI. They obviously don’t actively promote other platforms but they also do absolutely nothing to stop you from installing them, or making literally any changes to the device that you want.
Instead they made every single component available for purchase from a third party retailer, who also includes detailed tutorials and diagrams.
Now could they be better and lower their commissions and refuse to allow DRM? Sure. But at least they put those commissions to good use developing pro-sumer hardware.
for me where valve is “the good guy” is having replacement parts available day one and having a decent enough queue system that might not of been perfect but helped to keep the scalpers at bay. then add in them not trying to lock it down, like letting you chose your own boot animation and making it easier to do when someone first did it, and it makes a great case for the device to me. all of that instills confidence in me to buy it.
valve isnt perfect, and no corporation is your friend, but thats a refreshing change from nintendo and sony and microsoft who try to lock the device down as hard as possible.
The Steam Deck receives five star support, promise me that about any of the alternatives and then you speak.
Everyone’s already mentioned the touchpads and SteamOS, but I’ve also not found any other device besides my Steam Deck that runs games as capably at 10W / 15W. That’s important for me in a handheld. Too bad the screen doesn’t support VRR or it’d have been perfect.
As someone who games at 4k on a video card from 2017, I can confirm that VRR is a must-have feature for gaming at lower frame rates.
VRR means that falling off your set frame rate doesn’t matter. 56 FPS is just as smooth as 60 FPS. If something explodes and the game drops to 40 for a second, you don’t really notice.
I do love my Deck and use it all the time. It is also the most frustrating piece of kit I’ve owned in a long while.
I’ve always been concerned about the build quality too. Mine is well looked after, only 7 months since new, and I keep it in the case when not used. I noticed literally yesterday theres a crack in the upper front portion of the deck housing, directly middle above the LCD. How?!
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Oh yes the software is the frustrating part for me, far more than any hardware issues. For many of your reasons. I should have clarified. The hardware I fucking love, apart from that goddamn crack in the middle of the air vents :(
But despite the issues I still love the thing, and it is absolutely the best Game Boy Advance I’ve ever owned too which helps
Steam Deck has also been the harbinger of Proton development. Even if you don’t own one and never plan to own one, you now have the option of gaming rigs which run Windows games without needing the cost and bloat of Windows. That is an absolutely unprecedented game changer (pun intended).
Of course there are issues with the Deck. But it’s not like Valve’s “good guy image” came from nothing.
SD for the win!!!
