Windows on the deck is trash so i would pick the steam dexk any day
ally, cause I already have the deck
Ally of course. Silly really to come here and ask. Whatcha expect?
Since I will be playing mostly 2+ year old games on the Deck, the extra performance in the same resolution doesn’t really warrant the poor battery life and inferior screen IMO
One thing to keep in mind though, the Ally does have a higher resolution screen. While its dpi is going to be greater, the performance tradeoff might not be worth it to play at 1080p.
My ally has now become my at work/gamepass device. When at home, if the game is too demanding for the deck, I’ll just stream it from my pc. Being able to enjoy an oled screen away from my desk is just too awesome.
Well first off why do you need to choose?
My sister recently just bought an LCD one without knowing about this one and I bought this and felt bad tbh. I wanna see if it’s worth keeping for myself or giving to her.
Well the biggest one to note is the ally doesn’t have a properly working SD card slot/reader as far as I know. And the deck isnt able to play most games with anti cheat.
But aside from those I guess it comes down to whatever is user friendly IMO and personally the deck is just that.
Where as when I’ve used the ally I felt like I kept getting lost or having trouble navigating with menus.
So for me it’s steam deck that wins.
Pure performance ? Ally.
Better handheld experience? Steam Deck.
I love how people say about Deck’s “seamless experience”, “console experience” and other similar phrases. I just got my OLED - updated to 3.5.7 and basically it’s a fkin brick. Most games crash after 3 mins - yes verified games. Almost ALL games. Those that don’t crash have dips to 20 fps and I’m not talking about demanding games, I have this in Hades for example. USB devices don’t work - I connected keyboard from my PC -> it doesn’t work. And apparently when I got to this subreddit and steam community forum, I see that basically everyone with 3.5.X update have those issues.
I started digging and see that those GPU issues are known for over a month (October 20, see GitHub) and Valve didn’t fix it yet. Hell, at first that just said that this is overlay bug and it works fine, can you image? (if you don’t belive me, just read the issue). More than that - they decided that’s it’s good to include this “feature” in Stable release along other OS breaking bugs. Those are not small bugs that you can just ignore. I LITERALLY can’t use the device. It’s like NO ONE tested the OS before the release from Valve team. I mean it’s hard NOT to see those bugs. I just configured, updated the device, downloaded some games and can’t play anything right now on it :(
It’s been 2 years since first Deck release and it seems that SteamOS is still in alpha phase. I say the Rog Ally had BIOS issues in the beginning, but there are no critical issues right now looking at the subreddit. Aside from burning SD card ofc, that won’t be fixed by updates.
Now, I would kindly appreciate explanation how is Steam Deck a “console/seamless experience” for someone? I think that Rog Ally had less issues software on first day than Steam OS in the recent update. I use Windows since Windows XP and must say that never have I ever had such critical issues. Sure there were some fuckups where I had to reinstall bluetooth/wifi driver or sth like that (favorite thing to break on Windows), but never my OS broke and made my device unusable.
I don’t know if it’s just a single fuckup from Valve and it was perfect before, but I’m not waiting few months for Valve to fix it. From what I see it’s just a hyped device, a lot money put into marketing of “how awesome and polished it is”, but in reality they can’t do an update after 2 years on market. If you can, pick the Ally. I’m returning my brick first thing on Monday.
I’d pick the Ally if I had money but bang for your buck the deck wins
I don’t have either yet, but I am interested in getting a handheld gaming device and have been doing a lot of research lately.
Steam Deck is the “safer” investment, Asus doesn’t have the best reputation for ongoing support from what I’ve read. Aside from that, Steam Deck fits the handheld niche more comfortably than the Rog Ally. The impressions I’ve gotten is that the SD is more convenient, it has a much better battery life, has much more community support, has the much MUCH nicer screen and so on.
While the ROG Ally is pretty much worse in all regards EXCEPT for performance. It can push those heavier games to considerably (~15 frames) higher frame rates at higher qualities.
Personally though, as a HANDHELD device, the entire reason I’d be purchasing one in the first place is for convenience, and that’s where the Steam Deck beats everything else. The SD OLED runs quieter, cooler, longer, has a more seamless software experience, has the much nicer screen (which is more important for making 90% of the games look MUCH nicer than they will on any other device).
So really… SD OLED will be clearly better for 90% of games, which are the games you want to play on a handheld in the first place. The latest, heaviest games aren’t something well suited to handheld play anyway. Sure the ROG Ally CAN run them, but it’s still going to be at the sacrifice of everything else that the SD OLED has over it.
Personally, that equation falls clearly in the favor of the SD OLED. It’s the better handheld experience for the vast majority of games.
Tree-fiddy.