Hands-on: The Asus ROG Ally is a versatile gaming handheld

It's very apparent that Asus wants to make this device feel as optimized as possible for this form factor, and I'm a big fan of what the company has already achieved here. Let's take a closer look.

The ROG Ally hardware feels great

Asus makes plenty of gaming hardware, including controllers, and it's apparent that the company knows what it's doing. The Asus ROG Ally feels very comfortable to hold. The shape fits perfectly in the hands (my hands, at least), and the way the bottom corners are increasingly thinner really helps with that. The grips are also textured, so it feels like you have a comfortable and firm grip on the device.

That quality translates to the rest of the hardware, too. The analog sticks feel pretty great to use, as do the shoulder triggers and buttons. The face buttons also feel like what I would expect of an Xbox controller, so they're not overly soft or clicky. There are also rings of RGB light around the analog sticks, which are a fun addition.

There's also a pair of rear triggers you can map to certain macros for additional controls. More input methods are always appreciated, especially for more proficient gamers, but I never find these buttons all that intuitive to use on any controller.

I quite like the screen on this hardware, too. It's Full HD and it supports up to a 120Hz refresh rate, and it looks great in terms of overall color and sharpness. The big problem with this kind of screen on a handheld is how much battery it uses, but Asus does give you ways to limit the framerate. You can also use AMD Radeon Super Resolution to render games at a lower resolution and upscale them, which should also help save some power.

Asus has some special software to make it feel like a gaming device

The thing I was really interested in was learning about the software Asus is using to optimize the experience for a small-screen device like this one. It's no secret that Windows 11 isn't particularly good at this kind of thing, and that's especially true if you want to use the controller buttons to make it work. To help with this, there are two big pieces of software at play here: Armoury Crate SE and the Command Center, each with their own dedicated buttons.

Armoury Crate SE, as the name kind of suggests, is a special version of Armoury Crate, which is software that already ships on most ROG laptops. There, Armoury Crate is one of those apps you kind of wish manufacturers didn't waste resources on (though it has its uses), but Armoury Crate SE is crucial to the ROG Ally experience. For starters, it gives you a quick and easy way to launch your games without having to try to navigate Windows using a controller or a touchscreen. It also brings together games from all your platforms automatically, including Steam, Epic Games, the EA app, GOG, and more. However, you can also add games and programs manually, so you can get programs like emulators. It's pretty easy to use, too.

Armoury Crate is also where you can change things like the RGB lighting around the analog sticks, though I find the available options to be a bit more limiting than I'd expect. It also gives you image and audio settings, access to the performance mode and various tweaks, system information, and so on. It's actually pretty detailed, even including options for sustained and burst power limits, as well as fan curve configurations. You can also change the buttons that appear in the Command Center from here.

Command Center is the software that gives you access to quick settings for performance and the overall experience. It's an overlay accessed through the button on the left side of the screen, and it lets you change performance modes (between 9W, 15W, and 30W), toggle features like the frame limiter and Radeon Super Resolution, and access a virtual keyboard. It also has volume and brightness sliders, so you can easily change those settings, too. According to a recent report, Asus is working to offer more options, too, like turning off some processing cores to save power, and I was also told at the event that Asus wants to give users more control over the device's performance.

Even with that, it won't always be a super smooth experience. I've noticed that sometimes games don't load when you first try to open them, and you can tell there are some quirks with Windows 11 still being in the background. I also had to come back around to the ROG Xg mobile demo station because the team was having some trouble setting up the connection to the external monitor. Little annoyances like that can pop up with Windows.

The Asus ROG Xg Mobile can give you a proper desktop gaming experience

There weren't a ton of games for us to try at the show, but I did get to play Ghostrunner, a fairly intense and fast 2020 slasher, and it was all pretty smooth. It was running at high settings and 720p resolution, with Radeon Super Resolution enabled to increase the sharpness. With a screen this small, you can play games at 720p and not notice a big difference, and with upscaling, I didn't see anything that looked subpar. There isn't a lot I can say about performance based on this short hands-on time, but this is pretty fast hardware.

Of course, it's still a laptop processor with integrated graphics, but if you want a more serious desktop gaming experience, there's the Asus ROG XG Mobile. This is an external GPU dock, meaning it lets you connect a much more powerful graphics card — up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop, in the latest model — and it also gives you a lot more ports. You can connect an external monitor along with a mouse and keyboard, and play games with much higher settings. I was playing Elden Ring at 4K resolution with high settings, and it was running at about at 30–40FPS which is far from a bad result for this kind of hardware.

Of course, by the time you get the ROG XG Mobile, you're spending over $2,000 on the whole setup, and you might as well build a PC that can handle 4K gaming even better. But it's all about versatility, so you can play your games on the go but get this powerful setup at home.

If you just want to connect the ROG Ally to an external monitor without the GPU, you can use a USB-C hub, and Asus even has its own hub that's like a power adapter, but with an HDMI and USB Type-A port, so you can use peripherals more easily.

Asus also had some prototype designs at the show

Other cool things that Asus had at its booth were prototype designs for the ROG Ally, which give us some insight into the company's thought process. There are a few interesting variations here, with one of the earlier concepts simply having a screen attached to a controller. There was also a black prototype that was very thick and bulky. One of the designs (seen on the right in the image below) was basically just an Xbox controller split in half with a screen in the middle, pretty much like the Project Q handheld Sony recently announced. At least Asus was smart enough to abandon that idea, though.

Other designs included different approaches for the D-pad, touchpads similar to what the Steam Deck has, and one model was even going to have a kickstand, so you could use it with an external controller. One of the near-final prototypes was pretty similar to what we ended up getting, except it came in black, and Asus ended up going for white instead.

This was all pretty cool to see, and Asus went through a lot of trial and error to get to the final design. I'd say it worked out pretty well since the final unit feels pretty great to use.

As we've mentioned, the Asus ROG Ally will be available in various markets around the world. It's available starting on June 13 starting at $700 for the Z1 Extreme model. A cheaper model will be available later this year.