The Steam Deck has finally been surpassed — by a fork of Valve’s own experience - Bazzite turns the Asus ROG Ally X into today’s best handheld while putting Windows to shame.
The Steam Deck has finally been surpassed — by a fork of Valve’s own experience - Bazzite turns the Asus ROG Ally X into today’s best handheld while putting Windows to shame.
An Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life.
One of the appealing things about the Steam Deck is its repairability. Valve even made the analog sticks modular, published a teardown video, and partnered with iFixit to make replacement parts available, IIRC.
It would be hard to convince me that a device that doesn't beat the Deck in this area is "today's best". It's important.
GamersNexus proved that ASUS is a scummy company and the ROG Ally isn't a great product
No touchpads. OOTB experience questionable and Bazzite is a community project, compared to first party support from Valve for the Deck.
And the display isn't definitely better. Yes it's 120 Hz, higher resolution and VRR, but the Deck's OLED has proper HDR support and 90 Hz is probably enough for this type of device (as is the resolution, although I'd take a higher res screen as well for 2D games). The main thing that the Deck's screen is missing is VRR imo.
Plenty of comments have already addressed the touchpads. But the other thing that only the steam deck does right now, is the symmetrical joysticks at the top of the device. Personally, I find having the right joystick farther down on a heavy handheld absolutely brutal for ergonomics, and it's the reason I never touch my Switch Lite
I'm sure Valve loves the fact that more people are locked into the Steam store.
Steam is great, and there's workarounds for using other installed games/stores, but... kinda feels bad that this stuff is so integrated into the Valve/Steam experience.
Don't get me wrong, I use my steam deck... a lot... and I buy most of my games on Steam... I just wish GOG and Epic integration was a little more integrated, just so I don't feel so locked in to one company. (yes, I'm aware of heroic launcher, and other options, but they're still just hacked on extra steps that don't always work)
I'll be honest, the Ally as a complete product is not appealing to me whatsoever. Yes, it's much faster and better on paper, but it's not better in reality. Admittedly Bazzite makes it a lot better, but it still has way too many drawbacks, compared to Deck. Even more so, it can be said about whatever MSI made
No touchpads? Not even a contender lmao
As someone that has both (and I did install Bazzite on the Ally) I have found myself still using the Steam Deck. Like many in my (admittedly fortunate) situation, I had a deck first then got an Ally later out of curiosity if the "more power" aspect would make an impactful difference in gaming on more demanding titles. And while yes you can get more frames/use higher graphics settings on demanding titles, I keep going back to the Deck because it's just a better overall experience. Even with Bazzite on the Ally, there's just this level of Jank that prevents me from using it as my main "console."
A recent example: I finally beat Horizon Zero Dawn (original version ran great on the Deck and I played through the whole game on it) so naturally I fired up the sequel, Forbidden West. Since it's a newer game it's a bit more demanding and not officially a verified Deck game, but I've been able to get it to run at a mostly steady 30fps anyway. I was curious how much better the Ally would run it so I tried it for a day or two, and while I get more fps, the frame pacing and controller response and screen and speakers just soured the experience so I went right back to the Deck and I'll be playing the rest of the game on that. I had similar experiences with other demanding games like Cyberpunk, BG3, Dragon Age, etc.
And yes I know that there is "tweaking" I can probably do to make things "perfect" on the Ally but I just want something that works when I want to just play a game, but allows me to go down the tweaking rabbit hole when I want to. The Steam Deck does that in all regards. And no, my issue with the Ally aren't from a lack of knowledge (I've worked in IT for over 20yrs, I know what I'm doing when it comes to making a PC work) because I do often mess around with the Deck to "perfect" a respective experience with a game.
Maybe when Valve finally releases SteamOS for other hardware will I give it another go (though they can't change the hardware itself), but until then, I'll stick with the Steam Deck (and my big rig for the few games that are just too demanding)
Edit: and for the curious, I only got around 40fps on Forbidden West in the most demanding areas compared to 30fps on the Deck, and I put the two on identical settings, including graphics preset, resolution (720p on Ally, 800p on Deck because aspect ratio) and everything else. So the added power didn't do enough to justify the rest of the experience.
today’s best handheld
no trackpads, I rest my case.
It won't surpass the Deck for me until they put trackpads on it!
The possibility of needing to deal with Asus tech support kinda ruins this whole thing.
And in a week at CES Asus will likely launch a new model with official SteamOS.
surpassed in what? sales? doubt! quality? doubt.
what is this AI Slob blog ad?
I don't own any of these, but the Microsoft (Windows) hate is appreciated here.