20250901_asus-rog-ally-x-instead-of-geforce-now

GeForce Now Isn’t for On the Go After All

I travel a lot. Every week, I spend more than ten hours on the train. Plus one evening at my parents’ place, away from my PC. Despite all that, I still want to be able to game when I’m away from home.
A few months ago, I considered getting a gaming laptop but decided against it. Instead, I opted for Nvidia’s game streaming service, GeForce Now. It actually sounds like a fair deal. For a little over 20 euros a month, you can play many of your purchased games from anywhere in high quality—streaming makes it possible.

The “actually” has less to do with Nvidia and more to do with the internet itself. On the train, you have two options for getting online: via the mobile network or via Deutsche Bahn’s Wi-Fi. The mobile network is significantly faster, but also much more volatile. I find it strange that there’s practically no mobile reception, especially when entering and stopping at the Mannheim and Karlsruhe train stations.
The Wi-Fi is more reliable and rarely has a complete dead spot. But it’s nowhere near fast enough for GeForce Now.

But the internet isn’t reliable in other places either. I’m writing this post right now from a campsite in Southern Italy using my smartphone’s hotspot. There’s supposedly Wi-Fi here, but I haven’t managed to connect to it in a week. And the two or three out of four bars of 5G are probably just marketing. Top speed: 7 Mbit/s with a ping of just under 95 ms. Often worse. That makes GeForce Now little to no fun at all.

Local Sunshine Instead of Distant Clouds

The cloud experiment has failed, at least on the go. I also have to be honest, gaming on a MacBook, even with a mouse, just isn’t that great. I could, which I haven’t tried yet, bring a controller along. But then I still have to set up the laptop and connect to the internet. Plus, my games just don’t work on macOS.

So the alternative is to have a device that can run games locally. I don’t want to lug around another laptop, and it’s not optimized for gaming anyway. So, a gaming handheld. The choices are devices with Windows and devices with SteamOS. The latter is based on Linux and is supposedly more optimized. Windows, on the other hand, is more flexible. I don’t have a personal preference, especially since SteamOS or Bazzite can now be installed on many Windows devices.

Finding a device wasn’t actually that hard, or so I thought at first. Valve, MSI, Lenovo, and ASUS are the major players in the market. The MSI Claw and Lenovo Legion are too big for me, the Steam Deck and Legion Go are too weak, which left only the ASUS ROG Ally X, and I was on the verge of buying it. Then it occurred to me that all these devices are almost a year old, and I started looking for announcements of new generations.

Microsoft and ASUS Are Collaborating

Not much new on the market. MSI just released a new Claw with an Intel APU, and Lenovo announced a new one with a new AMD APU. But both are too big again. Valve is waiting and saying nothing at all. That leaves ASUS. And lo and behold: a new gaming handheld has been announced, with the new AMD AI Z2 Extreme. Not a revolution, but still 20–30% more performance for the same power consumption. It would be a shame not to wait for that, right?

I’m not sure, but I’m going to wait anyway. Why unsure? The new handheld from ASUS will be called the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X and is the result of a collaboration with Microsoft. Xbox-style grips are supposed to make it more ergonomic, but also thicker. It will also get an Xbox interface, and the Windows on the device is optimized. That actually sounds good. Finally, an interface that fits a handheld, and more power for games. But how will it work with Steam? I haven’t used the Xbox Store at all so far and don’t plan to. I’d also be interested to know if I could install SteamOS or Bazzite on it if I wanted to.

Then there’s the price: €899.00 is announced or rumored. The price isn’t quite certain yet. The ASUS ROG Ally X is currently available online for €729.00, which is 19% cheaper, and its price will surely drop again with the release of the new device. So the extra performance is directly reflected in the price. At least one-to-one. But as I said, I’ll wait for the release, watch some reviews, and then I’ll decide. But it will almost certainly be a device from ASUS.

In any case, I’m looking forward to being able to game on the go, even when the internet isn’t so fast or stable.