surpassed in what? sales? doubt! quality? doubt.
what is this AI Slob blog ad?
today’s best handheld
no trackpads, I rest my case.
I’ll be honest, the Ally as a complete product is not appealing to me whatsoever. Yes, it’s much faster and better on paper, but it’s not better in reality. Admittedly Bazzite makes it a lot better, but it still has way too many drawbacks, compared to Deck. Even more so, it can be said about whatever MSI made
As someone that has both (and I did install Bazzite on the Ally) I have found myself still using the Steam Deck. Like many in my (admittedly fortunate) situation, I had a deck first then got an Ally later out of curiosity if the “more power” aspect would make an impactful difference in gaming on more demanding titles. And while yes you can get more frames/use higher graphics settings on demanding titles, I keep going back to the Deck because it’s just a better overall experience. Even with Bazzite on the Ally, there’s just this level of Jank that prevents me from using it as my main “console.”
A recent example: I finally beat Horizon Zero Dawn (original version ran great on the Deck and I played through the whole game on it) so naturally I fired up the sequel, Forbidden West. Since it’s a newer game it’s a bit more demanding and not officially a verified Deck game, but I’ve been able to get it to run at a mostly steady 30fps anyway. I was curious how much better the Ally would run it so I tried it for a day or two, and while I get more fps, the frame pacing and controller response and screen and speakers just soured the experience so I went right back to the Deck and I’ll be playing the rest of the game on that. I had similar experiences with other demanding games like Cyberpunk, BG3, Dragon Age, etc.
And yes I know that there is “tweaking” I can probably do to make things “perfect” on the Ally but I just want something that works when I want to just play a game, but allows me to go down the tweaking rabbit hole when I want to. The Steam Deck does that in all regards. And no, my issue with the Ally aren’t from a lack of knowledge (I’ve worked in IT for over 20yrs, I know what I’m doing when it comes to making a PC work) because I do often mess around with the Deck to “perfect” a respective experience with a game.
Maybe when Valve finally releases SteamOS for other hardware will I give it another go (though they can’t change the hardware itself), but until then, I’ll stick with the Steam Deck (and my big rig for the few games that are just too demanding)
Edit: and for the curious, I only got around 40fps on Forbidden West in the most demanding areas compared to 30fps on the Deck, and I put the two on identical settings, including graphics preset, resolution (720p on Ally, 800p on Deck because aspect ratio) and everything else. So the added power didn’t do enough to justify the rest of the experience.
Steam Deck is more than software and a slightly old APU, its also the controlls and build quality. Tbh I dont think any company can truly surpass the Steam Deck.
People have the wrong ideas. Steam Deck LCD was a pure test object anyway, where they saw that there was a market, which is why Valve also released the Oled version. Valve has left the hardware open so that you can also install other OS. Valve may also see competition there, even if the competition releases more powerful hardware. Valve’s hardware is still secondary and steam, which is installed everywhere, is still their core product. The better hardware the competition brings, the more power-hungry games people will buy.
Steam Deck vs … is just nonsense.
