It's an Xbox. It's an ROG Ally. It's the
Xbox ROG Ally X. And there's a lot to
unpack here because this is loaded with things that I have never seen before.
For starters, this is my very first hands-on with the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme,
a Zen 5 16CU mobile gaming monster, if
my first impressions are anything to go by. It's also the first time a third-p
partyy PC has ever borne the Xbox name.
And even bigger, yes, than even those two other things. This is the first time
that the Xbox team has been given the power to dive under the hood and
fundamentally alter the gaming experience on Windows. I'm talking Xbox
team code right into the Windows branch. Like your PC boots directly to an Xbox
full screen UI that brings together all your favorite games across Game Pass,
Windows, and yes, even leading thirdparty app stores. Not only
that, but the Xbox team was given the power to trim the fat, so to speak.
Meaning that in the new gaming UI, non-essential processes, even the
Windows desktop, are simply not loaded, which frees up substantial system
resources. They're quoting 2 GB of RAM savings now and have made it very clear
that they're not done yet. It's cliche, folks, but Valve appears to have
awakened the giant, and this thing could be a gamecher for handheld PC gaming.
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Let's kick things off with the elephant in the room. the big kind of funky
looking elephant in the room. This is not a slim, sleek console like the
Nintendo Switch 2. But that decision was made for a number of very good reasons.
See, the goal from the Xbox team was to take the Xbox controller experience and
translate that to a handheld PC. That means large contoured grips, full-sized
analog sticks, a subtly angled screen to improve neck ergonomics, and in the X
version, impulse triggers like we first saw with the Xbox One. I assumed
Microsoft wouldn't provide competing devices at this first look. So, I
brought a whole backpack of them. And the most obvious one is, of course, the
original ally. And the interface is extremely similar with only the
rhombus-shaped Xbox button really being added by comparison. This is used to
access the game bar overlay and armory crate, which raises an interesting
question. What's the armory crate button here for then? I don't know. I've asked
if maybe it could be a reconfigurable macro button going forward. I got a firm
maybe on that. Realistically, a lot of things are still up in the air on this.
The back is completely different and really shows how much ASUS, probably
with some help from the Microsoft team, has learned about ergonomics over the
last couple of years. Even though this is a heavy device, very much like the
Alli X, which at least managed to lose the uh squared off corners, it feels
lighter. And I was really unsure about the angled screen. Honestly, I kind of
thought I'd hate it, but I completely forgot about it when I was using it, and
it just feels natural. Of course, Asus isn't the only ones who makes handheld
PCs, and some makers figured out that
ergonomics were important right from the get- go. So, how's it compared to the
Steam Deck? Obviously, the middle section is way thicker and it's
noticeably heavier, but from a packability standpoint, it's actually
less wide and you do get the benefit of
larger face buttons, though you lose the touchpads that many Steam Deck users
really love. As for the Switch 2, I had intended to talk more about this
comparison, but it's clear from looking at them that these are entirely
different classes of device, and the customer for one is simply not going to
be the customer for the other, I don't think. Bottom line, while the weight
might be a turnoff for some, I think they nailed the ergonomics on this.
Though, uh, ironically, actually feels a
little closer to the curves of the Dual Sense than it does to the Xbox
controller. Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing.
Now, I mentioned there are two versions of the Xbox Ally, and there are, and
there are enough differences between them that you will not want to accidentally buy the wrong one. From the
outside, the X version is black versus white with impulse triggers and an
upgraded Thunderbolt compatible USB 4 port next to the regular USB 3.2 Gen 2.
This port allows the use of powerful external GPUs, but that's about it.
Across both, we get the same IO that will be familiar to owners of previous
generation Allies with a volume rocker, UHS2 micro SD card, 3 and a half
millimeter combo jack, and a power button with Windows Hello fingerprint reading. No biggie so far then. But
inside, these are very, very different beasts. The Xbox Ally X features a
cutting edge AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor with three Zen 5 and five Zen
5C cores, 24 gigs of lightning fast 8,000 mega transfer per second LPTDR5X
memory, a terabyte of storage, and an whopping 80Wh battery. The Xbox Ally
NonX does not have all of those things.
And while it is a little lighter, at least it's not even smaller. And
particularly disappointing to me was the inclusion of an albeit tuned version of
AMD's Ryzen Z2A processor, which from
early leaks appears to be very similar to the Zen 2based Aerith processor from
the original Steam Deck, which was announced
4 years ago. Now, to be clear, these are both current gen machines in other ways.
They both use 80mm M.2 SSDs for easier
upgrades. They've both got Wi-Fi 6E and they both come with a reasonably speedy
65 watt charger, but the NonX is weaker by enough that Microsoft explicitly
positions it as a 720p gaming console,
which makes one of the other similarities between the two devices
kind of unexpected. See, the screen is the same between both models. And
actually, for that matter, the same as previous versions of the Ally. 1080p 120
Hz with Freync premium variable refresh rate and 500 nits peak brightness. So, I
guess on this one, you're either going to render out a lower resolution or rely
on AMD's FSR upscaling in order to reach native. In either case, it's an okay
display. It's good enough that I still daily drive an Ally, but it is not on
par with the eyepopping HDR, instantaneous response times, or
incredible low brightness night gaming comfort of the Steam Deck OLED. One of
my first questions then was with such different hardware across the product
family, how is Xbox going to manage gamers expectations and work with
publishers to optimize the experience? The answer to this is a little complex,
but it is worth hearing because it gives us tremendous insight into Microsoft's
vision for this device and for Xbox more broadly. Like Valve, Microsoft is
working on a verified program of sorts. But unlike Valve, Microsoft obviously
won't have just one piece of hardware to target. Meaning, I wouldn't expect to
see an Xbox ally setting in the graphics quality drop down anytime soon. So, what
are they going to be doing then? Well, for one thing, they're going to be validating the usability elements just
like Valve does. Does the game support a controller? Does text scale correctly on
smaller, higher DPI displays? As for the performance side, well, the strategy is
going to involve using Windows telemetry data, including specs of your machine,
the game you're playing, and gaming frame rates to group similar systems
together to give gamers a rough idea of which titles will perform well. All of
this is going to be presented in the game library of the Xbox full screen
experience. And I'm going to come back to the game library in a second because
first, I got to say, the UI looks slick.
And more importantly, it's the first thing you'll see when you boot up your
handheld or wake it up from sleep. They've done so much here. On top of the
resource optimization that I mentioned earlier, the Xbox team has a really cool
multitasking interface that gives you quick access to a browser or Discord.
And they claim they have already managed to triple the efficiency of standby with
a ton more work coming to make this the most console-like PC experience you've
ever had. None of which is to say that you will lose out on any of the good
things about gaming on Windows. Compatibility is expected to be on par
with regular Windows. And should you desire a more desktop-like experience,
you can access that using the joysticks as a mouse or with standard peripherals,
either connected directly or through a dock. The system will just load up the
necessary Windows processes and hopefully put them back to sleep when
you go back to the Xbox full screen experience. They didn't have a firm answer on that one. Nor did they have a
firm answer on how Windows updates are going to be managed. Are they going to
be more Windows-l like with the constant interruptions and the background
resource hogging and the flavor or are they going to be more Xbox like TBD?
Okay, let's come back to the game library. Now, the idea here was to bring
all your games together in one place. And I know I can already see the XKCD
comic in my mind's eye, but this implementation looks like one that I
might actually want to use. bringing together your Windows games, your Game
Pass games, your cloud streamed games, and even remote play from your Xbox
console, allowing you to quickly and easily synchronize your progress and
achievements and your recently played titles, so you can just grab and go and
game anywhere. The new game bar also,
honestly, kind of sick. For the first time ever, I have wanted a hotkey to
access the game bar. Who'd have thunk it? Instead of a big cluttery full
screen interface, they used the shoulder buttons to flip through menus in a way
that was honestly intuitive to me within seconds of my hands-on time. They also
showed off gamepad support, by the way, for entering pins from the Windows lock screen. It was super cool. And all of
this sounds great, at least for the privileged few who own an Xbox Alli X.
But what about the rest of us? Well, coming back to the vision, hiding away
at the bottom of one of the slides was a very interesting little nugget that
described these innovations as being great for handhelds like the Xbox Ally
and Alli X. That like is doing a lot of heavy lifting. While the highlight today
is obviously the partnership with Asus ROG. When the Xbox team got jacked into
Windows development, it seems to me that they weren't tasked with cleaning up
Windows gaming for one premium handheld device, my impression is that they were
tasked with cleaning it up more broadly and bringing it in line with Microsoft's
vision that in the future, every screen is an Xbox. So, I think that at some
point we can expect general Windows users to benefit immensely from these
developments, many of which are positioned as long-term projects that
will be constantly improved with feedback from both partners and from
gamers, which is a really good thing
because while I couldn't get a firm answer on pricing of these new allies,
I'm expecting them to be more in line with previous allies than with
Microsoft's traditional console competitors. They're uh they're going to
hurt a little. Hurt almost as much as I feel like the Xbox folks watching people
like me lament the death of handheld gaming on Windows have hurt. First they
must have been hurt because they knew that what we were saying was true and
they were powerless to fix it. And then it must have hurt because they knew that
they'd finally been given the power to do something to fix Windows gaming, but
they've been stuck operating in stealth mode. Well, now that the cat's out of
the bag and they're ready to talk about it, the energy is palpable, both from
Asus and Microsoft and also from the other folks that have laid hands on
these devices. I'm also feeling another kind of energy, the energy to tell you
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this video, you know what? I'd say the closest analog is when we first checked
out the Steam Deck under very similar circumstances. We didn't get to do as
much gaming, though I did get to play a preview of Gears of War that looked
incredible and makes me extremely bullish on the performance of the Z2
Extreme.