Asus ROG Ally will soon be released worldwide

On April 1st, ASUS announced the launch of its inaugural handheld gaming console, the ROG Ally, which many gamers perceive as a formidable rival to the Steam Deck. As a leading manufacturer with extensive experience in producing laptops, ASUS possesses design expertise in mobile devices that Valve simply cannot match.

ASUS recently declared that the ROG Ally will soon be released worldwide, potentially earlier than many had anticipated. According to ASUS, the ROG Ally will boast a “competitive” price, fueling the anticipation of numerous gamers.

The ROG Ally measures 280 x 133 x 39 mm and weighs 608g, making it slightly smaller than the Steam Deck in terms of shorter, narrower, thinner, and lighter dimensions. The ROG Ally features a 7-inch screen, but with a 16:9 aspect ratio compared to the Steam Deck’s 16:10. Moreover, the device offers superior resolution at 1080p and an increased refresh rate of 120Hz, a response time of 5ms, and a brightness of 500 nits.

The ROG Ally is equipped with a custom AMD APU; the CPU is based on the Zen 4 architecture, while the GPU relies on the RDNA 3 architecture and employs a 4nm manufacturing process. This custom chip is likely a specialized Phoenix APU. Although ASUS remains tight-lipped regarding the custom SoC’s specifications, rumors suggest it could be comparable to the Ryzen 7 7840U, featuring 8 cores and 16 threads, with an integrated GPU of 12 compute units. At 15W, the ROG Ally’s performance is said to be 50% greater than the Steam Deck, and at 35W, it doubles the Steam Deck’s capabilities.

Industry insiders point out that the ROG Ally’s SoC, which combines Zen 4 and RDNA 3, is evidently superior to the Steam Deck’s Zen 2 and RDNA 2 configuration and more advantageous than the Zen 3 chips found in other similar products on the market. Although the ROG Ally boasts superior hardware performance and perhaps a more favorable cost-to-performance ratio, optimizing software for such handheld gaming consoles is crucial, as demonstrated by the Steam Deck.

Rumors suggest that the ROG Ally will be priced at approximately $650 and is expected to hit the market within this quarter.