ASUS ROG Ally Review: Ryzen-Powered Handheld Gaming Powerhouse
The 15W performance mode of the ROG Ally is interesting. On the one hand, the performance is very impressive. You gain more when rising from 9W to 15W than you do by going from 15W to 25W. (That seems unintuitive, but it's just about how the chip scales.) On the other hand, if the battery life at 9W is mediocre, at 15W it can be disappointing.
Still, there are a lot of games that you can play on the ASUS ROG Ally in 15W mode that you simply can't play in 9W mode. If you want to play titles like Elden Ring, God of War, Nioh 2, or the new Street Fighter 6, you're simply going to have crank up the power limit.
Most PC games will be playable on the ROG Ally in 15W mode, as evinced by the gigantic chart above. You may not want to play the game in that mode, whether due to middling performance or meager resolution, but it'll almost assuredly work and be playable.
Apex Legends Performance Report
You may not have heard, but Apex Legends is kind of a big deal. One of the most popular battle royale games in the world, Apex Legends is sometimes seen as the "grown-up" cousin of Fortnite. Where Fortnite is very cartoony and makes no attempt at having any kind of coherent lore or story, Apex Legends is a slightly more serious experience explicitly set ten years after the ending of Titanfall 2, and features deeper game mechanics that reward skillful play over pure luck.
The game uses Respawn's own engine, which actually has its origins as a hacked-up and extended version of the Source engine used in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It's a nice-looking game, and it runs pretty well, too. However, to get it running at 15W on the ROG Ally, you're going to have to cut back on the settings pretty hard along with enabling the game's Adaptive Resolution feature.
We set the target framerate to 48 because that's the breakpoint for the ROG Ally's screen's Freesync range. It can use Low Framerate Compensation below that, but staying at or above 48 is really preferable. Across several matches, it had no problem maintaining that framerate, although the resolution visibly dropped pretty sharply at times.
While docked, you can max out the game in native 1080p and still get solid performance, although we'd actually recommend leaving the adaptive resolution feature enabled. Well, most people play these games with all of the graphics turned off anyway.
Elden Ring Performance Report
Elden Ring is a game that surely needs no introduction. The winner of last year's coveted Game of the Year award at the Geoffs, Elden Ring successfully transitions the Dark Souls formula into an expansive open world. It is brutally difficult and not particularly well-optimized, but you can get it running at 15W for sure.
The best combination of resolution and settings we found for playing Elden Ring at 15W on the ROG Ally was to drop the render resolution down to 1600×900 while putting the game's settings preset at "Medium." This gives you a nice compromise of clarity and visual fidelity, with solid performance in the game's toughest areas.
Alternatively, you can drop all the way to 1280x720, and then raise the settings preset to High. This gives you further draw distance and more detailed textures at range, which looks better in some of the larger, open areas. The lower render resolution really doesn't look bad on the little 7" display of the ROG Ally, either.
Arguably the most interesting thing to do with this game, though, is to plug in the power adapter, switch to Turbo mode, and enable ray-tracing. That's right—this is RDNA 3, after all, and it's not half bad at ray-tracing. Elden Ring is fully playable on the ROG Ally in 1280×720 resolution with Medium settings and ray-tracing set to "Low". You might think this is pointless, but take a look at the difference:
The extra shadows persist a fair way into the distance and honestly look really nice. This is a perfect example of how dropping features is usually a worse deal than dropping resolution. Using ray-tracing still runs a bit slower than the "High" setting does, but it's completely playable, and we think it's the better choice at 25W.
Ghostwire: Tokyo Performance Report
Ghostwire: Tokyo got almost completely passed over on its release, which is a damn shame because it's actually a pretty sweet game. Basically, supernatural stuff is going down in Tokyo, and almost everyone in the city has vanished. Spirits from Japanese folklore are rampaging in the city, and you play a young man who must exorcise them through first-person melee and ranged combat. Despite the horror theme, it's really an action game.
Ghostwire: Tokyo uses a customized version of Unreal Engine 4, and it's a pretty heavy game as far as it goes. The graphics options menu is pretty barren, and we have to leave ray-tracing off in this title, even in 25W mode. However, it does support both AMD's FSR2 and Intel XeSS upscalers, which is good news on machines that are as starved for memory bandwidth as we are.
Interestingly, when you launch Ghostwire:Tokyo for the first time on the ROG Ally, it will warn you about the old graphics driver on the ROG Ally. Yep—despite that this is a brand-new machine, it's running an RDNA 3 graphics driver from early April. You can't update it, either; AMD's drivers don't recognize the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. Hopefully this situation gets resolved soon, because it's possible that the old graphics driver is to blame for some (unintended) visual anomalies in Ghostwire:Tokyo.
These visual anomalies mostly present as a shaky, inconsistent resolve to the image. Some objects, like a bush in the first area of the game, render very incorrectly, with obvious visual glitching. Amusingly, you can work around these visual anomalies by using XeSS upscaling rather than FSR2. It actually looks a bit better at the same preset (i.e. balanced to balanced) most of the time, but it also runs a bit worse than FSR2, so the choice is yours.
Hitman III Performance Report
Don't be fooled by the name; Hitman III is in fact the eighth Hitman game. It's true; look it up. Hitman III is of course a game where you play the emotionless Agent 47 as he is contracted to take the lives of various persons, usually of ill repute or deeds. The modern Hitman titles are notable in a technical sense for being some of the most prominent game releases to make much use of massively multi-core microprocessors.
That is to say that Hitman presents an interesting performance problem for the ASUS ROG Ally. It wants CPU speed, and not just single-threaded, but multi-threaded. It uses all those cores for crowd generation and physical simulations. Of course, as a 3D-rendered video game, the GPU needs its juice, too.
Modern laptops have the ability to balance their power budget between their CPU and their GPU, sending power whereever it's most required. Well, the ROG Ally only has the one chip, but it still has two separate types of processor inside, and it's fully capable of doing the same thing. 15W is a low enough power limit that you can sometimes run into the case where both CPU and GPU want to clock to the sky, yet there's simply not enough power available.
It also does a good job of improving performance here for the same reason we just discussed. Reducing the load on the ROG Ally's GPU allows more of that delicious power budget to be spent on clocking up the thirsty Zen 4 CPUs. That improves the Ryzen Z1 Extreme's ability to handle the rich simulations in this game.
Street Fighter 6 Performance Report
Street Fighter 6 just came out, and in case you've been living under a rock, it is awesome. It's also surprisingly demanding on a system, no doubt in part due to having been developed primarily for the PlayStation 5. It uses Capcom's own RE Engine that also powers Devil May Cry V and most of the recent Resident Evil games.
You can get Street Fighter 6 running on the ROG Ally in 15W mode, but it's going to take some doing. Your author spent some time fiddling with the settings to figure out what each one did to the performance and the visuals of the game. Ultimately, there's no real way to avoid it: you're going to have to cut the render resolution.
It's kind of a bummer in a fighting game, because the characters are so large and detailed that you really notice slashing the resolution. Unfortunately, even on 25W mode, a consistent 60 FPS isn't guaranteed, even in Versus fights, without lowering the rendering resolution.
Keep in mind as well that Street Fighter 6 has an icon that shows online players whether you're using Wi-Fi or an Ethernet connection, and many players will snub you if you're not playing on a wire. It's totally possible to hook up Ethernet to the ROG Ally, but you will need a USB adapter. We recommend just buying a docking station if you're going to play fighting games online with this system.
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Performance Report
What more is there to say about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom? The sequel to Breath of the Wild came out to near-universal praise, and rightfully so, as it expands on the massive-but-barren open world of that title with new encounters, new mechanics, and the next chapter of that particular Link and Zelda's story.
Well, one more thing to say about it is that it runs flawlessly in Yuzu Emulator on the ASUS ROG Ally. You don't even need to fiddle with settings; dump the firmware and game from your Switch system, copy them over to the ROG Ally, load it up in the emulator, and away you go. Most of the time the game actually runs below 1080p, but you can get mods to fix that if you want.
In fact, thanks to the advanced state of Breath of the Wild modding, there are already user mods to upgrade Tears of the Kingdom to a full 60 FPS game. Those won't do anything for you on 15W Performance mode, but if you hook up your ROG Ally to power, you can absolutely rip through the latest Nintendo adventure at 60 FPS. Just be wary of broken cutscenes and buggy physics.
