Here at Ars, we have been writing about rumors of a portable Xbox for literal decades now. With the ROG Xbox Ally, Microsoft has finally made those rumors a reality in the weirdest, most Microsoft way possible.
Yes, the $600 ROG Xbox Ally—and its souped-up cousin, the $1,000, ridiculous-mouthful-of-a-name ROG Xbox Ally X, which we tested—are the first official handheld hardware to sport the Xbox brand name. But Microsoft isn’t taking the exclusive-heavy, walled garden software approach that it has been committed to for nearly 25 years of Xbox home consoles. Instead, the ROG Xbox Ally is, at its base, simply a new version of Asus’ Windows-based ROG Ally line with an Xbox-flavored coat of paint.
That coat of paint—what Microsoft is calling the Xbox Full-screen Experience (FSE)—represents the company’s belated attempt to streamline the Windows gaming experience to be a bit more console-like in terms of user interface and overall simplicity. While that’s a worthy vision, the execution in these early days is so spotty and riddled with annoyances that it’s hard to recommend over the SteamOS-based competition.
Promises, promises
When Microsoft announced the ROG Xbox Ally this summer, the company promised that what it was calling a new “Xbox Experience for Handheld” would "minimize background activity and defer non-essential tasks" usually present in Windows, meaning "more [and] higher framerates" for gaming. While this is technically true, the performance improvement is so small as to be almost meaningless in practice.
In our testing, in-game benchmarks running under the Xbox Full Screen Experience were ever so slightly faster than those same benchmarks running under the full Windows 11 in Desktop Mode (which you can switch to with a few button presses on the ROG Xbox Ally). And when we say “ever so slightly,” we mean less than a single frame per second improvement in many cases and only one or two frames per second at most. Even on a percentage basis, the difference will be practically unnoticeable.