ASUS ROG Ally Review: Ryzen-Powered Handheld Gaming Powerhouse
ASUS ROG Ally: 25W PC Gaming, Productivity And System Benchmarks
You'll need full power for Cyberpunk 2077, but it's absolutely playable on the Ally.
Finally, we have 25W mode results for you. We didn't test 25W mode in handheld form too much beyond battery life testing because those results were simply unsatisfactory. Instead, most of our 25W testing was done while plugged-in. This actually increases the SoC's power limit by 5W, supposedly, but as we've mentioned, we saw values over 50W at times. All of these recommendations are for using the system in "docked" mode.
By the way, we keep saying "docked," but there is no actual "dock" for the ROG Ally, at least not yet. ASUS does offer a charging "dock" of sorts that is actually just a regular 65W USB charger with an HDMI out and an extra USB port on it. You could certainly use a Steam Deck dock, but that seems almost heretical.
At this level, we're talking about games that absolutely need the extra oomph from the 25W Turbo mode to run. As a result, it's sort of paradoxical, but these games are the ones that have to be run with the lowest settings and the smallest resolutions.
Many of these games cause the ROG Ally's Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC to hit its thermal limit of 95ºC. That, obviously, causes thermal throttling, reducing performance. However, if the chip wasn't thermal throttling, it would be power throttling, so the end result is ultimately more or less the same. We would like if ASUS were more aggressive with the fan curve—possibly causing some fan noise—to eke out that little extra bit of performance, though.
Cyberpunk 2077 ROG Ally Performance Report
Cyberpunk 2077 got a lot of press on its release that focused on how broken the game was, technologically speaking. It's true—CD Projekt's sci-fi action-RPG launched in an incredible state, barely playable. We're three years out from that now, though. The game has been beaten into an unrecognizable form compared to when it launched, and it really doesn't get the credit it deserves for being the Crysis of our day.
Of course, there's the path-traced mode that physically simulates all light bounces, but I'm not even talking about that. Cyberpunk 2077 is a comically demanding visual showcase all around, able to put the hurt on monstrous discrete graphics cards and multi-core CPUs without even resorting to ray-traced effects.
Sadly, the path-tracing mode in this game crashes within seconds of enabling it on the ROG Ally. We suspect that this could be, just like the visual errors in Ghostwire: Tokyo (and a similar crash bug in F1 22), down to the relatively-old Radeon driver on the ROG Ally—although it could also be because the system doesn't have enough RAM.
However, the simplest way to get Cyberpunk 2077 running on the ASUS ROG Ally is to just toggle on the Steam Deck graphics preset and then flip FSR2 on at its Performance preset. You don't have to use Performance to get arguably-playable framerates, but mid-40s feels a lot smoother than low 30s.
Forspoken Performance Report
Poor Forspoken. Maligned on release for its cringe-worthy dialogue and poor support for anything but the fastest PCs, it's now—much like Cyberpunk 2077—been patched into a much better state. Well, technically speaking, anyway; we're not sure the developer would want to compromise its creative vision on the dialogue front.
We didn't really expect Forspoken to work; the ROG Ally is under the game's minimum specs in a big way. To our surprise, it actually did launch and play, but the image quality was awful with everything set to minimum, and the performance still wasn't good, with framerates in the low 20s and lots of stuttering.
We were already pretty confident that the game wasn't suited for the ROG Ally just a few minutes past the intro, but we went ahead and got through the first couple of combat encounters just to be sure. It's not impossible that Square-Enix could patch this game into a state where it would run on the ROG Ally, but for now, we have to recommend against playing it on this new ASUS' handheld machine. She just doesn't have the GPU grunt it wants.
Hogwarts Legacy Performance Report
Hogwarts Legacy is another game we didn't really expect to work on the ROG Ally, but it completely exceeded our expectations. To some degree, this is likely due to work that the developer, Portkey Games, has done on the title since we (and many other outlets) complained about its poor performance on launch.
Once you've done those steps, you're ready to begin your adventure in the wizarding world. It definitely requires the 25W Turbo mode; attempting to play it in Performance mode gave us single-digit frame rates. So saying, this probably isn't one you'll be enjoying on the go, but if the ROG Ally is your only gaming PC, you're good to go for Hogwarts Legacy. We'd probably recommend an external display and a wireless controller too, though.
Red Dead Redemption Performance Report
Red Dead Redemption never came to PC, which means that yes, this is another emulated title. PlayStation 3 emulation is notoriously difficult, and Red Dead Redemption is widely considered to be among the most challenging titles to emulate. You can do it on the ASUS ROG Ally, but only just barely.
Frankly, the game doesn't run well, but it's honestly no worse than it ran on PlayStation 3 hardware, which is to say, poorly. Framerates reach toward 30 but more frequently hover around the high 20s, and sometimes dip below that. Dropping the resolution doesn't help much here; this is a pure CPU bottleneck.
Still, the game is more playable than Forspoken, and this is arguably the most difficult PS3 game to emulate. Any other PS3 exclusive you'd like to play, such as Demon's Souls, Dragon Crown, Heavenly Sword, the Resistance series, or maybe Metal Gear Solid 4 should probably play just fine on the ROG Ally.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Performance Report
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an exceptionally scalable game. It's totally playable on the 15W Performance preset, as we showed previously, but we think it's much more enjoyable on the 25W Turbo preset. The extra juice allows you to take the game from its middling "Medium" graphics preset up to the next setting, "High", while enabling ray-traced shadows, themselves on "High".
This screenshot is super dark, but trust us, it's awesome.
That setting for the ray-traced shadows enables most of the point lights in the game to cast ray-traced shadows that realistically dim the areas behind nearby objects obscuring the light. Normally, it's a small visual impact for a big performance hit, but on this GPU it's really not so bad thanks to the abundance of GPU compute relative to its available memory bandwidth.
Of course, getting playable performance out of such a configuration requires using a high degree of upscaling—Performance, in fact, which means that you're actually rendering out just a quarter of the pixels on the screen. Intel's XeSS is available, though, and it does an admirable job cleaning up those pixelated edges.
With all of that said, we wouldn't blame you if you simply preferred the near-60-FPS performance of just toggling ray-tracing off.
ASUS ROG Ally System Benchmarks
Given that the ROG Ally is essentially a little PC with a mean-as-heck eight-core Zen-4 CPU inside, we had to run some system benchmarks on it. After all, when the system is installed in a dock, it's really not much different from any other PC. You could use it for whatever tasks you wanted, and as it happens, it's pretty darn suited for it, too.ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO disk benchmark is a fairly quick and simple test which measures read/write bandwidth and IOPS across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem is up to snuff.
The performance of the Micron 2400 SSD is acceptable, but not much more. It's heavily read-focused, which is understandable given the client-facing workload it was created for. Micron's 2400 is both affordable and power-efficient, so there's really nothing to complain about here, but we would have liked to have seen a little bit better performance from this SSD considering the lack of storage expansion beyond a MicroSD slot.
Speedometer 2.0 Browser Benchmark
We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to gauge performance in web applications. This test automatically loads and runs several sample apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and even vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream. All tests were performed using the latest version of Chrome.
Speedometer is a fully single-threaded benchmark that tests, in order from least to most important, memory latency, CPU single-threaded speed, and browser efficiency. On the fairly-clean install of Windows that was present before we started installing junk all over it, the ROG Ally produced an extremely admirable result. A score of 323 puts it in rare company, ahead of even some bulky desktop replacement machines with 125-watt CPUs.
Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark
This is the latest 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. It's a purely CPU-based test that doesn't make use of the graphics processor at all, and it scales very well with additional CPU cores. We ran both single- and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here.
The ROG Ally's Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor once again tops the charts, due in large part to its explosive single-threaded speed. It even manages to beat out the Ryzen 9 6900HS thanks to its newer Zen 4 architecture.
Geekbench 5 System Benchmark
Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real world workloads in image processing and particle physics scenarios. We tested the notebooks featured here in Geekbench's single and multi-core workloads. It measures single-threaded performance allowing a single core to stretch its legs, and multi-threaded throughput to put all cores under a heavy load.
Mark down a third win in a row for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. Not only does it beat out the 35-watt Intel Core i7-1360P in the Lenovo Yoga 9i in multi-core, it also takes home a win in the single-core test. A very impressive result for AMD here.
PCMark 10 System Benchmarks
PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the fourth (yellow) bar in each cluster.
ASUS' little handheld here destroys the competition in every single category except for the Digital Content Creation test. In that test, discrete GPUs can offer a big advantage, and that's why the ROG Zephyrus G14 barely stays ahead of the ROG Ally. Otherwise, the new handheld would have won this race.
3DMark Night Raid Graphics And GPU Test
The venerable 3DMark has numerous different graphics tests that focus on various sorts of systems. For this comparison, we're sticking with the Night Raid test, which is aimed directly at integrated graphics and lower-end systems.
Only, it feels a bit silly doing so, because the ROG Ally takes the second place in this benchmark—behind a massive GeForce RTX discrete GPU, and ahead of a couple of other discrete GPUs. This result is a clear improvement on the Radeon 680M found on board the Ryzen 9 6900HS and Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War Benchmark
Finally, we wanted to throw one head-to-head game benchmark in the mix, but ratter than compare the ROG Ally's Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC to a bunch of oversized discrete GPUs, we instead decided to compare it against an array of thin & light laptops for which we already had benchmark data.
Unsurprisingly, the new ROG Ally wiped the floor with all of these older laptops—even the systems with integrated RDNA 2 Radeon GPUs as well as that older Dell system with the discrete GeForce RTX 1050 Ti. The gaming performance of the ROG Ally is fantastic for a machine with integrated graphics, and not bad at all even in absolute terms.
Let's talk just a little bit about battery life, noise, and heat before we get to our conclusion...
