Valve’s Steam Deck runs Linux, while the Asus ROG Ally is a Windows machine. But both are computers, so you can install whatever you want. Comparison with phonics We explicitly use Valve’s Steam Deck and the new Asus ROG Ally on Linux to see which handheld console excels at gaming under similar operating systems. After switching OS from Windows 11 to Arch Linux on ROG Ally, the performance margin between the two consoles didn’t change much. ROG Ally showed better game performance than Steam Deck, but Steam Deck was able to outperform ROG Ally in terms of power efficiency and battery life.
Testing ROG Ally on Linux is definitely an interesting proposition. Many Linux distros probably have less bloatware than Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 operating system, which can improve performance and battery life. The Linux version also comes with various AMD-based drivers that can change the performance behavior (scheduling) of AMD Ryzen CPUs in Linux compared to Windows, possibly resulting in better performance.
However, according to Phoronix’s testing, installing Linux on ROG Ally didn’t change the behavior significantly compared to running the game on Windows 11. The handheld was faster than the Steam Deck for the right performance profile, but still lost the competition in terms of efficiency. Steam Deck consumes far less power than ROG Ally.
Even when ROG Ally was running in a more power efficient mode, the handheld could only match the performance of the Steam Deck most of the time, but not significantly surpass it.
for example, Cyberpunk 2077, ROG Ally averaged 61 FPS on Arch Linux’s ACPI performance profile, but dropped to 45 FPS when running on the OS’s standard power profile. The Steam Deck (still running SteamOS) closely matched the ROG Ally on non-performance power settings, outputting an average of 44.66 FPS.
In terms of power consumption, the Steam Deck was significantly better, averaging just 10.76 watts. Cyberpunk 2077On the other hand, ROG Ally with performance preset consumed 30W of power. This is 3x the power of the Steam Deck. Sadly, the ROG Ally’s more power-efficient profile doesn’t save you money here, and it still draws more power than the Steam Deck, averaging 14.77 watts.
Cyberpunk 2077 This was one of the worst-case scenarios for ROG Ally, but most of Phoronix’s test suite still exhibited similar behavior. The only benchmark where this behavior was not confirmed was in the CPU test, and of course ROG Ally outperformed the Steam Deck in every situation thanks to the much newer Zen 4 architecture and four additional CPU cores. showed significantly better performance.
Returning specifically to Linux, Phoronix’s results are our own on ROG Ally (running Windows 11) in that Steam Deck was able to significantly outperform ROG Ally in battery life and power efficiency in the console’s performance profile. It almost matches the review of. Sure, you can switch back to a more power efficient mode, but you’ll end up with the same performance as a Steam deck with 2 generation newer hardware.
Phoronix’s results proved that the ROG Ally’s efficiency difference was likely hardware-related and could not be fixed by an OS swap.
