Soooo yeah, I sold my Steam Deck (which I love) in preparation to get an OLED but I was very curious about the ROG Ally, mostly for the performance and VRR, so I bought one.

Here’s a quick rundown of my experience:

  • Took 2h or 3h just to get set up. Between Windows setup, windows updates, etc. it was very frustrating not being able to use the machine right away.
  • After I thought I was mostly ready to install games, the machine was incredibly slow. Like, opening Explorer or Steam would take 30s+. Activity Monitor didn’t really show any high cpu processes. Just intermittent blips of 20% or 30% on some tasks but would go back down. Machine was unusable though.
  • Googled for a bit and found there were lots of updates on MyASUS and Armory Crate. Two distinct pieces of software I had never used. Why two???
  • After I updated everything and did a firmware update everything was speedy again, so I installed a few games.
  • Started Sekiro as my first game since I had trouble hitting decent FPS on the Deck. The game would not respond to button inputs. And yes, I was in “game controller mode”. Quit out of the game and start it again: same thing.
  • Decided to reboot Windows and voila, now it received button inputs. (sigh)
  • The performance is indeed incredible. I was very impressed with VRR in particular.
  • I then tried Guardians of the Galaxy. Crashed on the first run with no error.
  • When I was finally in the game I was playing around with the power profiles / game modes / keyboard shortcuts using the Armory overlay or whatever it’s called. After changing a few settings the overlay froze. I was able to toggle it on/off but tapping the buttons did nothing.
  • Force quitting Armory crate didn’t seem to work. Had to reboot. Maybe I had to force quit some other dependent service?

Anyway, I could go on but it was just frustration after frustration. I never thought I’d see the day Linux would be simpler and friendlier than Windows but here we are.

I returned it even though I liked the form factor, performance, screen, VRR, the quiet fans, etc. The hardware is great. Windows is a non-starter for a handheld console.

Let’s go OLED STEAM DECK!!!

  • DeliciousGlue@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This stuck out a bit

    The next thing I did was follow a video from Retro Game Corps. This is a step by step guide and only took me half hour to do a set up and very basic and easy to do.

    When the consumer has to resort to 3rd party video tutorials to setup your device so they can just simply use the device for its intended purpose, you done fucked up something at some point as the manufacturer.

    But yeah, I think the Ally and the Deck are aimed at slightly different corners of the handheld gaming market in the end. Deck tends to be much more of a pick-up-and-play sort of a deal if you are a basic gamer who isn’t interested in delving outside of the Verified ecosystem. Ally seems to require at least some form of interest in tinkering a little bit. Not much, but a little.