Over a year ago, I took a look at the ROG Ally X which was a decent improvement over the original Ally, and ASUS and Xbox have now partnered to introduce Xbox’s first branded handheld in the ROG Xbox Ally X which builds on the Ally X in some interesting ways.
A lot of what I wrote in my ROG Ally X review is still relevant today, with these devices sharing an overwhelming amount of similarities, with this review aiming to talk about what’s next in the ROG Xbox Ally X and what might be coming in the future.
If you’ve been following the Windows handheld market for the last 2-3 years, you’ll know what this device is about, but an important thing to cover is the fact that even though this device is being labelled as an Xbox handheld, it is a Windows handheld, which is actually better as it can not only play every single new first-party Xbox game, but it can also play games from every other launcher including Steam and Epic Games Stores.
This is clearly going to be Xbox’s way of thinking moving forward with its new console rumoured to be also more of a PC than ever before. The strength of these handhelds running Windows for compatibility has also been coupled with the fact that obviously Windows wasn’t designed to be on a handheld which brings navigation issues and little quirks, and this has begun to be addressed with an updated Xbox app that brings in all of your games from other launchers, as well as an Xbox full-screen experience which I’ll touch on in a little bit.
Whilst I can absolutely see the vision with this, it is still very much early days. An example of this is the fact that the initial boot-up is still your generic Windows 11 boot-screen which works absolutely perfectly, but it’s far from the experience that you get with the Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch for example.
Once you are through the setup, you then boot into the new Xbox full-screen experience, which is already fantastic. As I mentioned, you can now pull in all of your other launcher games into the Xbox app, or launch them through Armory Crate, but it’s switching between apps and closing games through the new full-screen task manager that is an absolute joy and feels so natural to the handheld, rather than having to tap around the full Windows experience.
This comes with a advantages to performance too as you’re not running a bunch of unnecessary backgrounds tasks and whilst these seemed to be minimal so far, I think it’ll get better with time as more features are introduced. You can of course still load into the full Windows experience quite easily but in my few weeks of testing, I haven’t needed to yet.
The new Xbox button on the ROG Ally X brings up the Windows Game Bar and a long press brings up that full-screen task switcher which runs incredibly smoothly. You’ve got an Armory Crate button to pull up that window in order to quickly change between performance modes, or turn on real-time monitoring and a bunch of other settings, and you’ve also got a library button that takes you straight to your Xbox games library.
Another thing that Xbox does incredibly well (better than anyone) is handle cloud saves and game licenses and with consoles, PC, this handheld and Cloud Streaming all operating in different places, it really means that you can jump between your console and this handheld to play games on the Xbox app with absolute ease, and again it’s something that I’d only expect to improve.
These are all huge improvements on what was there before and just bring consistency and uniformity to the Windows experience which greatly differed depending on which handheld that you were using. It’s worth mentioning that this full-screen experience is coming to other handhelds as well, so it’s absolutely the future for these handhelds.
Outside of those few new buttons, the inputs of of the ROG Xbox Ally X are identical to that of the ROG Ally X. In addition to dual USB-C ports and a MicroSD slot, you’ve got your start and select buttons, four face buttons, two analogue sticks, a decent d-pad, two back buttons, bumpers and triggers, which have been adjusted on the X model to feel more like Xbox controllers.
The big difference here is that the entire design has been changed in order to look and feel like an Xbox controller which most regard as the best feeling controller and it absolutely translates to the handheld experience too, giving you much more to hold onto and feeling great over a longer period of time.
As far as the screen goes, it’s the same 7-inch 1080p display that was in the Ally X with its 120hz refresh rate and VRR. Obviously, I’d have loved an OLED option and whilst the 7-inch display does feel a bit small, it is still an extremely fantastic display and no doubt we’ll see other options pop-up in the very near future.
The ROG Xbox Ally X has the new Z2 Extreme chip and it’s definitely an improvement (when added in with the background task saving measures of the new full-screen experience), but it’s not night and day. The reality is that you’re going to get a handful of more frames when playing at 25w in AAA games, but it’s the lowest tiers when paired with indie games where the chip can perform much better without chewing through battery.
The Z2 Extreme chip is capable of running at 35w when plugged in and this does make for a decent experience above the Z1 Extreme, but again, it’s not a night and day experience, and overall just makes for smoother gameplay. For instance, I was able to boot up Battlefield 6, Cyberpunk 2077 and Ninja Gaiden 4 and all of them ran incredibly well.
You’ll be able to play pretty much any AAA current game at at least 30 FPS with medium to high settings, and then if you want to crank that FPS up, you just have to lower the resolution or take advantage of FSR and Frame Generation, but given this is again literally a portable PC, you can tinker to your heart is content on a game by game basis, but the chip is more than good enough and just as good as anything else on the market.
Again, this is something that is going to get better with the Xbox Ally X with features such as Automatic Super Resolution that uses the NPU to upscale games running at lower resolutions to run a lot better, and there’s another feature called Advanced shader delivery that preloads game shaders during downloads so games launch faster and run smoother which is already in use with Gears of War Reloaded too.
Similarly, the battery life will hover at about the two hour mark when playing at that higher 25w performance mode, but you can get anywhere from 5-8 hours when playing on those lower tiers, taking advantage of the great 80wh battery that the ROG Xbox Ally X inherits from the original ROG Xbox Ally.
It’s worth mentioning that the ROG Xbox Ally X can also be used when connected to a monitor using any kind of USB-C dock or dongle and then used as a full-fledged PC and similarly, you can also do the same with your TV and have a larger screen gaming experience (although obviously not at 4k for most games), so this is really a versatile device and the category is only going to keep getting better and better.