ASUS ROG Ally X Review: Handheld PC Gaming Greatness
ASUS ROG Ally X Review: Software And Docked Gaming
ASUS ROG Ally X Software And Configuration
Just as with the original Ally, you'll use ASUS' Armoury Crate software to configure and manage the machine. You'll also need to have ASUS' MyAsus software installed, too, though, as some updates only come down through that app. The company says it's working to resolve this situation and deliver all updates through Armoury Crate, but until we hear otherwise, we recommend keeping both apps.
The default screen when you launch Armoury Crate (whether by pressing the dedicated button to open it or by lauching it manually through Windows) is the game library, befitting its intended use as a console-like front-end. The similarity to the SteamOS interface is probably not a coincidence. If you have many games installed, you can mark some as "Favorites" and have them show up on the left tab; on the right, you can click convenient links to install Steam, GOG Galaxy, the Xbox Cloud gaming client, and other apps.
The configuration page here is likely where you will spend most of your time in Armoury Crate. It's not that you need to use this page a lot—in fact, you hopefully won't have to come here much at all. However, this is where all the magic happens. On the right side, you can customize the Command Center overlay that is summoned when you press the dedicated button for it, and then over on the left there are buttons to open all kinds of configuration utilities. Many of the buttons are fairly self-explanatory, but we'll go through a few.
Up at the top, the "Configure" button takes you to this screen. From here, you can select to customize the bindings for either "Gamepad Mode" (which, by default, emulates an Xbox gamepad), or "Desktop Mode," which allows you to control the mouse and keyboard using the gamepad controls.
As you can see, you have two fully separate layers to bind, thanks to the existence of a "shift" function that lets you send inputs on a second layer; quite convenient. You can also modify the function of the sticks, the triggers, toggle Vibration on and off, and also configure the gyro function here. However, the calibration features have moved to a whole separate menu:
This is opened by selecting "Calibration" from the main settings menu and we recommend doing it for each device at least once. This will ensure that all of your Ally X's hardware is working properly. The original Ally shipped with a design flaw on the triggers that meant that you had to press them extremely forcefully to get them to register in some games. Now, even people with first-gen Ally machines can resolve this issue with this built-in calibration utility.
The "Performance" button takes you to this screen. Across the top, you can select the performance profile you want to use; this mostly affects power and fan settings. Where on the original Ally, the performance profiles were set to 9W, 15W and 25W, on the Ally X they're configured for 13W, 17W, and 25W. This gives you better performance in the 'Silent' and 'Performance' modes, albeit at the cost of some extra power use.
If you want, as pictured, you can also configure a manual profile which lets you set your own fan curves and power limits. We like setting SPPT and FPPT to 30W, ensuring consistent performance. However, we exclusively tested the machine in the pre-made profiles, since most users probably won't do that.
The "System Stats" page lets you take a peek at some specs of your machine; this page updates in real-time. That "Fan Acoustics" measurement is no joke; even on Turbo profile, the fans are completely silent. On the "Eco Assist" page, if you want, you can disable CPU boost. In theory, this allows your GPU the full power budget, but in practice, it mostly just made everything run really poorly. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Finally, on the GPU settings page, you can adjust how much memory is assigned to the GPU. The text is correct; by default, the ROG Ally assigns 4GB of RAM to the GPU. However, the Ally X defaulted to 8GB and we didn't touch it. You can also toggle AMD's graphics driver settings here if you for some reason don't want to use AMD's own graphics control panel.
You might wonder why we're not looking at the other three tabs in Armoury Crate. Well, that's because the third tab is basically there for ASUS to advertise at you, the fourth tab is where you'll find your screenshots and video captures recorded with Armoury Crate, and then the fifth tab is for people who login with an ASUS account. These last three tabs aren't particularly useful in our case.
We couldn't test AFMF 2 on the Ally X as the driver won't install.
We noted before how you have to get your software updates from Armoury Crate and MyAsus, and this is fine and relatively convenient for the most part, but it's a little frustrating in the case of graphics drivers. AMD, as PC gamers will know, releases new graphics drivers frequently, often more than once a month. You won't be updating the driver the Ally X that often, though. In our experience with the original Ally over the last year, ASUS only ships new graphics drivers for the integrated Radeon GPU about once a quarter, meaning you could be waiting months for critical fixes and optimizations for the latest games.
This is honestly our biggest complaint about the ROG Ally X, and one of our biggest complaints about the original Ally as well. It's not the end of the world, but quicker deployment of driver updates (or simply allowing us to install them ourselves) would really improve the experience for users that want to play the newest and most demanding games on the handheld. The Ally X is fully capable of playing these games, so missing out on the latest drivers is an annoyance. For example, we weren't able to test AMD's new Fluid Motion Frames 2 technology on the Ally X for this reason.
ASUS ROG Ally X Gaming Experience, Part 1
We've downloaded and tested over 80 games on the ASUS ROG Ally X. This is mostly because your author has an addiction to benchmarking modest machines, but also because we want to deliver the most useful perspective on the machine.
Here's the list of most of the games we benchmarked on the ROG Ally X, as well as our recommended performance preset for playing them...
Here's the list of most of the games we benchmarked on the ROG Ally X, as well as our recommended performance preset for playing them...
There are a few entries in this chart that cover multiple games, and there are a few games we didn't mention simply because the fact that they work well isn't a surprise. Games like Ultra Street Fighter 4, Chrono Trigger, Demon's Souls, and The Legend of Tianding are no problem for this class of hardware.
In fact, we only came across a single game that we couldn't turn into a playable experience on the ROG Ally X, and that was Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition. It works, to be sure, but even cranking all the settings to the bottom it struggles along at sub-30 FPS. We suspect this has to do with the ray-tracing-required nature of the title; it simply wants a bigger GPU.
Everything else we tested performed well. Demanding games with high memory requirements that crashed on the original Ally, including The Last Of Us Part 1 and Forspoken, run completely fine on the Ally X. We even got Immortals of Aveum working, and that game runs in 720p on the much more capable Xbox Series X. Notorious system smashers like Dragon's Dogma 2, Hogwarts Legacy, and Starfield run flawlessly now on the Ally X—as long as you keep the settings modest and play in Turbo mode on the device.
Here's our list of games that we found to really require the 25W Turbo mode. Actually, all of these ran best when the system was plugged in, giving it an extra 5W to play with. Some of these games can be configured to run in the "Performance" profile, but they're just not a very good experience. Whether due to software updates or the extra memory, Dead Space's 2023 remake runs much smoother on the Ally X versus the original machine.
Of particular note from this list are the original Red Dead Redemption on RPCS3 emulator and the F1 titles. When we reviewed the original Ally, we couldn't get F1 to launch, likely due to a driver bug. However, F1 22, 23, and 24 all play just fine on the machine now. Check out that frame rate with High settings there. It looks fantastic.
Meanwhile, Red Dead Redemption is still a mighty struggle for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, but thanks to major emulator updates over the last year, it's now possible to play Red Dead Redemption at a better framerate than the PlayStation 3 original. Arguably you should probably play the Xbox 360 version on Xenia emulator, but we don't own that version, so we couldn't test it.
Head over to the next page to see our results for Performance and Silent profiles.
