ROG Xbox Ally vs. Steam Deck – Which should you get?

The ROG Xbox Ally finally has a price tag, which is $600 for the base, and $999 for the “X” variant, giving us the chance to properly pit it against competitors and determine which one is worth your hard-earned, inflated bucks.

The Steam Deck is the leading PC handheld at the moment, being Valve’s massively successful hardware product after a series of trials and errors, though its cheap price comes at the cost of performance.

So, being the hottest two PC handheld consoles at the moment, we’ve decided to compare them directly, both on hardware, software, potential, and, naturally, their price-to-performance ratios.

Should you buy the Steam Deck or the ROG Xbox Ally?

Firstly, we will have to take a good, hard look at each of the handhelds’ components and see how well games run on them. We will use PC equivalents to gauge the performance, as well as dedicated Steam Deck and ROG Ally benchmarks for this segment. Secondly, we’ll analyze their operating systems, game libraries, and what you could get running on them, even if not by default.

Lastly, we’ll compare prices, how they reflect the above, and whether or not you should dish out the dosh for any of these handheld systems.

The components and performance

The following table contains each of the devices’ components, which are the most important bits of any given machine.

The base ROG Xbox Ally is strikingly similar to the Steam Deck OLED 512GB. I chose this one in particular since it fit the price range well and is internally the most competitive for the sake of this comparison, which doesn’t remove the fact that a $320 Steam Deck LCD exists, but it’s generally weaker with a worse screen, APU, GPU, and other internals.

Both the base ROG Xbox Ally and the Steam Deck OLED carry 16GB of specialized DDR5 RAM, the former having the somewhat more performant LPDDR5X variant. Both carry an AMD APU with RDNA 2-based graphics, though Valve does not go into the specifics of its CPU and GPU models. The ROG Xbox Ally features the Zen 4-based Ryzen Z2, whereas the Steam DECK is stuck with an older architecture, carrying a Zen 2-based APU instead.

This makes the ROG Xbox Ally fresher, newer, and likely more performant in modern titles, given that support for this architecture is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

When it comes to the screen, the ROG has a standard 1080p resolution and a 7-inch screen size, with a 120Hz refresh rate that should make any gaming experience very smooth and HD due to the high pixel density on such a small screen.

Steam Deck, on the other hand, has a low 1280×800 resolution, which does help with performance but looks nowhere near as good. It does have an HDR-capable OLED screen, which is as good as it gets, but the 90Hz refresh rate also won’t feel as smooth as what the ROG offers.

But the one handheld that stands out the most here is the ROG Xbox Ally X, the thousand-dollar option that has all the bells and whistles of a modern PC machine. With a great APU, a newer RDNA 3.5-based GPU, and 24 gigs of RAM, the Ally X edges out both of the other consoles by a wide margin.

These high-powered internals will reflect on battery life, which is bound to drain much quicker on both the ROG Xbox handhelds, while the Steam Deck should cruise smoothly at low temperatures and a lower power draw.

In most games, both the ROG Xbox Ally variants will probably win over the Steam Deck OLED, but I wouldn’t bet on the first one doing so all the time. It’s 50 bucks more expensive and has much newer components, but shouldn’t have a dramatically bigger performance, given both it and the Steam Deck have an RDNA 2 GPU integrated.

We’ll have to wait for a full release to see benchmark numbers, but I feel like it’s safe to say that the ROG Xbox Ally is the clear winner in the performance category, since it’s literally years ahead in its APU architecture and other internals.

Operating systems, game libraries, and potential

Both ROG Xbox Ally variants run a homebrew Xbox OS based on the Windows 11 Home edition. This OS eliminates many features of the desktop Windows experience to improve battery life, reduce background processes, and overall help the handheld achieve better performance. This OS fork is currently exclusive to the ROG Xbox Ally but is going to be released to the wider public at some point in the future.

Steam Deck OLED runs Valve’s Arch Linux fork, SteamOS, which is a custom-built operating system tailor-made for gaming, especially on Steam itself. Valve develops and maintains the OS and manually certifies games for the Steam Deck, which now largely feature a “Steam Deck” graphics setting within their options menu. Based on Arch Linux, it draws next to no power, has minimal background processes, and is almost the perfect way to game without being bogged down by your OS.

However, there are pros and cons to the SteamOS, precisely because it is based on Linux. Windows 11 is the default OS for most home computing devices nowadays, and installing any app, Steam included, onto it is pretty straightforward. To expand your domain beyond Linux, you’d have to install Windows on the Steam Deck on your own, which isn’t guaranteed to work well out of the box, requiring further tinkering to be done correctly.

Meanwhile, the ROG Xbox Ally can and will run any Windows app, and you can do with the system whatever you please, with a dedicated button taking you to the regular Windows desktop in an instant.

The Steam Deck is also pretty much bound to Steam, with Game Pass only available via streaming, which drains battery life and has tremendous input lag and quality issues. The ROG Xbox Ally has the Xbox app, so natively running Game Pass is no biggie, and likely even intended.

What’s more, the ROG Xbox Ally can run Steam and Steam games, though without Steam Deck verification, which shouldn’t be an issue, especially for Xbox Ally X users who will be able to run most games at satisfying performance with upscaling.

Thus, the Xbox Ally gives you the best of both worlds, trading in custom-made stuff for extra freedom and power.

Price, worth, and conclusion

The ROG Xbox Ally is a $599 machine, its big brother a $999 option, while the Steam Deck OLED sits at $549. All three are capable machines that’d offer you a tremendous amount of customization, freedom, and on-the-go gaming, no matter the genre. However, being so close in price, and with similar if not better internals, the base ROG Xbox Ally is an enticing offer over the Steam Deck OLED, while the Ally X remains out of reach as way too expensive.

Though it will offer a lot more than the base version in terms of raw performance, the screen remains the same, and so do many other things, which are not worth the extra $400 in my opinion.

If you are a fan of Valve and how they’ve been handling (pun intended) the Steam Deck, its SteamOS (which can also be installed on the Ally), and the store all of this is named after, then sticking to your guns won’t hurt you all too much.

After all, the Steam Deck is a capable machine, has Valve itself verifying games’ performance on it, and an OS that’s as fast as they come.

Is it worth $549? Probably, but compared to the ROG Xbox Ally, it should reduce its price to $499 due to its more aged components. That should put it ahead of the Xbox Ally as the better option, but right now, with these prices, I would choose the base ROG Xbox Ally personally, since you can do whatever you want with the thing, including installing SteamOS and doing as Valve does.

Like our content? Set Destructoid as a Preferred Source on Google in just one step to ensure you see us more frequently in your Google searches!