Tried out Xbox Ally: It just feels right

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From October 16, Valve's Steam Decks will have new competition: At Gamescom, Asus and Microsoft announced the release date for the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X handhelds – and announced several new software features.

heise online was able to get hands-on at Gamescom and talk to developers from Asus and Microsoft. It became clear that Microsoft is serious and is putting a lot of work into customized handheld software. And it is a good idea to provide handheld PCs with controller handles. This does affect portability, but the increased gaming comfort easily compensates for this.

The Xbox Ally feels great in the hand and the controller grips should feel familiar to fans of both Xbox and Playstation handhelds. The intuitive dimensions of the other control elements go hand in hand with the grips: The XYBA buttons are exactly where your fingers expect them to be. The shoulder buttons are also well placed, and the triggers have a little more play than on many other handheld PCs. Weighing in at around 700 grams, the Allys are not much heavier than the Steam Deck. Those who value maximum portability are still better off with the Switch 2, which weighs 500 grams and is significantly smaller.

Graphics power thanks to Ryzen Z2 A

Asus builds the Xbox Ally handhelds in collaboration with Microsoft. The two partners have also brought AMD on board to provide the necessary gaming performance. However, only the more expensive Xbox Ally X variant uses the latest hardware: It houses the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme with eight CPU cores (three Zen 5, five Zen 5c) and 1024 RDNA 3.5 shader cores. The Ryzen Z2 A in the standard Xbox Ally only corresponds to the technology level of the Ryzen 3000 from 2019, with four Zen 2 cores and 512 RDNA 2 shader cores.

A 7-inch full HD screen outputs up to 120 frames per second and supports variable refresh rates (VRR). The refresh rate is higher than that of the Steam Deck OLED (90 Hertz), which can improve the fluidity of movement at correspondingly high frame rates.

Disadvantage: The Ally handhelds have an LC screen with IPS technology, although OLEDs are more suitable for gaming. According to Asus, it would not be possible to combine OLED with a variable refresh rate (VRR) without torpedoing the battery life. In fact, the Steam Deck OLED does not support VRR either. In the end, Asus decided in favor of VRR and against OLED.

This is probably the better decision: On the Ally X, the frame rate of the "Doom The Dark Ages" we played fluctuated wildly between 70 and 40 FPS. Without VRR, players would constantly see image tearing unless they wanted to limit the frame rate.

Without OLED, gamers will therefore have to do without the fast response times and better contrast values of an OLED display if they opt for an Ally. Nevertheless, the image display made a good impression when we first tried it out: Colors appeared vivid, but the backlight bleeding known from IPS LCDs cannot be explained away. Dark sections in "Doom The Dark Ages" appear bluish rather than truly black.

You shouldn't put too much stock in the pure performance figures: There are too many variables and too many setting options to draw conclusions about the capacities of the ally handhelds just yet. The only thing that is clear is that the version without X is most likely to be sufficient for games without high graphics requirements.

Desktop or handheld Windows

Microsoft has worked a lot on software optimizations for handheld PCs in recent months. The main result of these efforts is a new interface for handhelds, into which the device boots by default. This special Xbox interface does not load all the background processes that usually run on Windows. This is intended to save performance and focus the user experience on the core gaming business. Users can access a combined library of several game stores via the interface, including Steam in addition to the Xbox store. It should even be possible to install these game stores without having to switch to the desktop view.

Users can switch to desktop mode at any time to gain more control over their system and take advantage of all Windows features. Microsoft has obviously copied Valve here. However, when switching from desktop mode back to handheld mode, the handheld must be restarted in order to reactivate all optimizations.