YouTuber Dave2D was one of the first reviewers to test Asus' ROG Ally consoles. In his notes, he commented that there could be a problem with the console, which has a hard time competing with Valve's Steam Deck with lower TDPs.
ROG Ally's AMD Ryzen Z1 APUs are not fully custom chips, but rather a derivative of the Ryzen 7040U series. ASUS and AMD worked together to implement a new voltage and frequency curve for the Z1 series to enable higher power efficiency at lower TDPs. But despite these changes, the Asus ROG Ally still struggles to compete with the Steam deck with lower TDPs.
Asus updates the firmware of the ROG Ally to make them go a little better
The Steam Deck features an AMD Van Gogh APU with quad-core Zen 2 architecture, giving you half the number of CPU cores and 4 fewer GPU clusters. Despite those limitations, the Steam Deck it was still performing better compared to ROG Ally in 9W and 15W gaming. It was even faster in some cases.
ASUS has just released a new firmware for ROG Ally that only works with the latest GPU drivers. This firmware provides a substantial boost in low power games, which are the games that best benefit from a portable console.
Dave2D claims that the new firmware finally puts the Asus ROG Ally on par with the AYANEO 2S, which is based on the Ryzen 7 7840U Phoenix APU. The increase is between 15% and 20% in games at 720p. The Ally is now as fast as the AYANEO 2S, so at those power targets both “Phoenix” consoles clearly outperform the Steam Deck.
But the Steam Deck still has the advantage in ultra-low power. The custom APU was designed to run even at 3W, although this mode should only be used for light 2D isometric gaming. But even at 9 W, the Steam Deck is actually faster than the ROG Ally in all games tested.
Source: Videocardz
