When I first picked up the Asus ROG Ally Xi, I thought it was an amazing piece of kit. It had a large 80Wh battery, 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a great chassis. Every physical ingredient was on the paper Required to be a Steam Deck Killer. But after turning it on, it greeted me right away abrasive application friction this makes it feel far from the perfect gaming handheld.
While there are bandaid solutions like the Asus Armory Crate, Nothing feels as seamless as SteamOS. As I’ve tried to set up, no amount of startup chats, custom key mappings, or shell optimizations can turn a desktop OS into a seamless console environment. Windows is unable to deliver a true handheld console experience, which in turn feels like sabotaging the hardware’s enormous potential with desktop-first design choices, aggressive background processes, and a complete lack of system-level control or integration.
Windows on a handheld is annoying
It’s nowhere near as seamless as SteamOS
When using a Windows handheld device like the Asus ROG Ally X, you’re not greeted with a seamless custom console environment. Instead, you’re greeted with a bloated desktop-first operating system that doesn’t quite feel right on a 7-inch touchscreen.
Of course, there are attempts to fix it, like the Asus Armory Crate SE or even Microsoft’s custom compact Xbox full-screen modes. No matter how polished the launcher skin looks, it remains like a fragile skin stretched over a desktop operating system on a handheld device. When the game starts, an update hangs, or the background window loses focus, the illusion breaks and you experience the friction of a desktop environment.
Forcing a mouse and keyboard operating system onto a gamepad controlled device will obviously cause glitches. Handheld devices require absolute input determinism, meaning that each key press must correspond to a predictable system action, but by design Windows treats controller inputs as a secondary emulation layer on top of the primary mouse coordinates.
However, an incredibly annoying window focus anomaly that plagues handheld games can also cause major friction. You click play in a custom launcher, but then a random background utility, Epic play store sync request, or user account control alert flashes invisibly behind the game environment. The system detects that the game window has lost active focus and then completely disables your physical joysticks and face buttons until you slide your finger across the touchscreen to click on the hidden executable.
The virtual keyboard can feel a little unstable, as the on-screen text input engines seem quite regular. Unlike the deeply integrated SteamOS keyboard, which overlaps seamlessly on any binary, the Windows virtual keyboard often doesn’t automatically launch when selecting game text boxes. It can block critical UI areas or crash completely when called during a borderless fullscreen application. Overall, the software experience on the Asus ROG Ally X and other Windows handhelds can feel completely unpolished.
Power cases are another point of friction
I need to be able to pause in the middle of the game
One thing I love about Steam Deck is being able to put the device to sleep even if I’m in the middle of a game. This gives you the ability to pause and resume instantly, tying into its on-the-go element. Steam Deck uses a custom Linux kernel-level suspend-to-RAM pipeline that allows you to press the power button, throw the device in your backpack for three days, and then tap the button again to resume gaming in less than a few seconds.
Unfortunately, you don’t have the same luxury on Windows gaming hardware. This is because Windows Modern Standby is a bit unpredictable on mobile APUs. Pressing the power button on the Ally X does not reliably freeze the game engine. Instead, it tells the operating system to go into a low-power sleep state, staying connected to the background network wires. This means that the system will often wake up in a closed case to load a routine firmware update, causing the system to run hot inside the packed case, which in turn will completely drain the 80 Wh battery.
On top of all that, you can’t even pick up where you left off in the game because it’s likely to crash or freeze in your handheld’s sleep state. No matter what settings you adjust, you can’t get a Windows on hand to replicate Steam Deck’s pause and play functionality.
SteamOS is superior
Windows can’t catch up
So why does Steam Deck take the crown for handheld gaming? The latest technical standout is Valve’s GameScope micro compositor. GameScope acts as an isolated sandbox layer between the game executable and the physical display panel.
It forces every game to experience a clean, uncompromised console display that allows for seamless system-level AMD FSR scaling, absolute refresh rate synchronization, and instantaneous refresh rate modulation.
This goes further than just a cover you get to fix OS issues on Windows gaming handhelds. Steam Big Picture Mode or Asus Armory Crate SE just doesn’t do the same thing as SteamOS, they just overlap to cover up the problem, but the problems will always be underneath.
The hardware is in place
Unfortunately, the program brings it down
The Asus ROG Ally X is a nice piece of mobile hardware, but the hardware itself is hard to use when you feel like the software is a constant sticking point. Trying to patch the desktop OS with software overlays is a temporary fix that doesn’t really solve anything. If anything, it ruins the plug-and-play spirit of portable gaming. Until we decide to develop a mobile version of the Windows operating system, these problems will continue.
- Dimensions
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11.02 x 4.37 x 1.45 inches (280 mm x 111 mm x 36.9 mm)
- Weight
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1.49 pounds (678 grams)
