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The first company I started was back in 2002 – I was building PCs for small businesses. Needless to say, I have a ton of experience with building PCs. But now, in my 40’s and married with three kids, I no longer have interest in building PCs. This is driven by other priorities in my life, as well as a desire for portability. For many years now, I have been a laptop gamer. I appreciate the portability while also having a near-desktop experience.
In June of 2022, I received OG Steam Deck (7″ LCD display with 512GB SSD). Since that time, gaming has gone from something I barely squeezed into my life, into something I can do nearly anywhere, anytime, while also being present with my family. None of that would have been possible for me if not for the suspend/resume feature of SteamOS. I was able to play through dozens of games in my backlog – sometimes just a few minutes at a time. Of course, I tried playing AAA games like Cyberpunk of the OG Deck. In fact, there are even Steam Deck optimized settings directly from the developers. And the broader Steam Deck community have come together to post optimal settings for other AAA games such as Elden Ring. It is possible to rock many AAA games on the Deck to a degree. But, if you really want to play AAA games, such as the recently released Black Myth: Wukong, you should look at handhelds that offer more power, such as the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. More on that later, but due note that at the time of publishing, the Legion Go is on sale for just $600 at Best Buy.
A Change of Habits
My current gaming laptop is a wonderful Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, with an Intel i9 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an RTX 4070 GPU with a max TGP of 35 + 115w. Between the hardware and the NVIDIA software features, such as DLSS, I am able to play AAA games on my OLED Alienware 1440p ultrawide monitor with a mix of medium and high settings. I can achieve about 60 FPS in demanding games, such as Black Myth: Wukong.
For the past two years, my preference has been to play games on my Steam Deck. I now have the 1TB OLED model, which offers a small increase in performance in some cases. But, ultimately, my game time is split about 80/20 in favor of the portable Steam Deck. And my laptop is acting more as a desktop – never leaving my office. I travel via plane a few days every other month, on average. I don’t ever consider packing my gaming laptop and I find myself hoping I am not in the middle of a fun AAA game when I have to leave for a few days.
This led me to an important purchase a few weeks ago: the ROG Ally X.
Portable AAA Gaming
With a 7″ 1080p display, which supports VRR, and an 80whr battery, the Ally X has become an important member of my gaming arsenal. It’s comfortable, albeit a bit heavy, with incredible speakers and performance that encourages AAA gaming. I bought it as an experiment. I told myself, if I can get a good experience at 1080p with Black Myth: Wukong, I’ll keep the $800 device. Sure enough, with FSR enabled and running at 17w Performance mode, I am getting roughly 50-60 FPS at 1080p. Granted, at low settings. But experimenting with AMD Fluid Motion Frames (more later) has helped me get even more out of it. There are dips here and there to the 40s, but they’re hardly noticeable thanks to the VRR display (note: VRR only functions when the screen is set to 120Hz. Dropping to 60Hz does help conserve battery life). I am roughly 30 hours into Black Myth, and about two-thirds of that has been on the Ally x. I did try to play it on the Steam Deck, but it wasn’t a good enough experience for me. The low textures and low FPS were a turn-off. Just last night I beat the Tiger-Vanguard boss while on the couch with my kids, who were playing Mario Party. That was such a fun moment – my son understood how much that meant to me. Just earlier in the day he watched me lose to that boss several times while playing on my laptop + monitor.
Putting the Ally X in 25w battery-driven Turbo mode does result in getting sometimes 10 more FPS in Black Myth. And I did not feel the need to park by an outlet. But my gaming habits are shorter play times, more often than not.
The Legion Go – Is Bigger Better?
There are several handheld gaming PCs available now. Most of which are very similar. They muster about the same level of performance, at the top end, and they have 7-7.4″ screens. There are a few outliers, the Lenovo Legion Go being the most prominent. I declare it “prominent” because Lenovo is a household brand with a great reputation, and the handheld is available at Best Buy, unlike the offerings from GPD, Ayaneo, and Ayn (Odin). While I have held a Legion Go, and I love the massive 8.8″ screen, I have not had an opportunity to properly test one out. But I can speak to a few important differentiators.
First, the screen. I just love the color profile and the massive size. That does mean its less portable than the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, but once you have a device in a case and in your bag, there isn’t much of a difference.
Second, the controllers are detachable. Although I have not tested this, I think that may make the Go the most portable of the big-three handhelds. I think if one were to detach the controllers, put them in a bag, and then place the Go into a secure case, it would be an overall smaller footprint than, say, a Steam Deck. In any case, the purpose behind detaching the controllers is to give the user another option for gaming other than holding the device up to his or her head. The controllers can be held in-hand and still function as normal. And there is an FPS-mode that converts the right stick into a joystick. I want to test this out! Shooters are my favorite genre of games (Metroidvania is second).
Third, the accessories. Lenovo have announced a slew of new accessories for the Go. Such as a controller carriage, a keyboard, and a USB-C dock.
While the large screen is awesome, and it shares the same Z1 Extreme SOC as the Ally Z1e and X, the Legion Go has a smaller battery and generally less comfortable feel in handheld mode, in my opinion, based on limited time with the handheld.
Why the Timing is Right
Going back to my RTX 4070-equipped laptop, suppose I wanted to get a better 1440p experience. That’s going to set me back $2,000, minimum, for a decent laptop with an RTX 4080, which has 12GB of VRAM. Or $1600 for an RTX 4070-Super/Ti equipped desktop. These handhelds cannot support 4K gaming, but in handheld mode, on those 7″ – 8.8″ screens, 1080p is plenty sharp. And on low or medium settings, that level of fidelity looks fine. Sure, I’d love to enable ray tracing and run all of my AAA games at max settings – it’s the nerd in me – but its just not necessary on a handheld. I play maybe 3-4 AAA games a year. I tend to spend most of my gaming time on less demanding games (Metroidvania genre). And, frankly, AAA games from 1-2 generations back: Dead Space 2, Quake, Doom (2016) and Singularity. These are older games I love to replay.
I can see myself waiting for the next generation of AMD Z SOCs to see how performance improves. I’ve read some credible speculation the next iteration of the Z will be 30% more powerful than the existing Z1e. If that translates into 80-90 FPS in a game as demanding as Black Myth, that would be more enticing to me than trying to improve my 1440p laptop experience or dropping a large sum of cash to go 4K (plus, then I’d have to upgrade my monitor). I bet these handhelds remain under $1,000 for at least one more generation. So the price point is lower than buying a new laptop or desktop, while providing that ultimate portability I desire.
The latest craze in gaming laptops is OLED panels. Many of the best selling laptops have made this transition: Razer, HP, and ASUS. There are outliers yet to make the jump, such as Lenovo, save for their 2023 Legion 14, which was not refreshed in 2024. There is not much growth left for gaming laptops. They can get thinner, but not without performance sacrifices. See the ASUS Rog Zephyrus G14 and G16. They are beautiful, but wattage is much lower on the GPU, and the prices are high. They made this jump to OLED while not upgrading the GPUs from their previous generation models.
Gaming handhelds are still finding their footing. They are not mature yet and the hardware vs. software battle is also going to bring some faster generation cycles to the market. For example, Valve recently announced they are bringing SteamOS to other handhelds. Namely, the ROG Ally. Windows 11 is not as bad for handhelds as some may say. But it’s not ideal. Note: it’s easier to manage Windows 11 on the Legion Go than the smaller handhelds. And Windows allows for other launchers and anti-cheat programs for popular games to run on those handhelds, whereas the Steam Deck cannot support them natively. If popular manufacturers follow ASUS to use SteamOS, I believe there will be a hardware alignment, which will help AMD tremendously as they aim to optimize their hardware for SteamOS. And users can still dual-boot into Windows if they choose.
Operating systems such as Bazzite give users a Steam Deck-like experience, while retaining key features such as AMD’s RIS, AFMF, RSR, and more. I am tempted to try this myself, but I feel like having official support for my products is the right move at the moment. The space is evolving quickly. AMD, Valve, Lenovo – all of the major companies involved are dropping updates. For example, several months ago, AMD and ASUS made AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) available for the Ally. And just a few weeks ago AFMF 2.0 was announced and is available in a preview driver. If you do want to forgo that official support and try out Bazzite, there is a great app on Steam called Lossless Scaling that can help you squeeze even more performance out of your games. It offers similar features available on the Ally, such as FSR. But, importantly, it can scale your lower-resolution games up to your native resolution of 1080p (on the Ally) or higher on the Legion Go. It takes some fiddling to get it right, but it does work well. Personally, I did notice the difference between the 720p and 900p scaled up to 1080p, vs running at native 1080p without Lossless Scaling running. In Black Myth, I prefer to run the game without Lossless Scaling and using AMD’s AFMF.
Should You Wait?
No. Look, I can go into detail and address that question for every persona out there. But let’s be real. You just read a long article about my journey through the handheld world these past two years. You are likely either considering buying another handheld, or you’re considering your very first. So, buy a handheld. They’re so great. Especially if you have kids or your travel a lot. Which one to buy? Now we’re cooking…that’s a tough one.
I think a great balance is a Steam Deck OLED for everything but the latest AAA games and either an Ally X or Legion Go for those AAA games. What I am finding, however, is the Ally X can replace my Steam Deck in more scenarios than the OG Ally could, due to that battery life improvement. But the Steam Deck is still the most comfortable of all the handhelds. The Legion Go is the king of modularity, thus far. I will try to get my hands on one for a longer period so I can update this article for you all. Cheers!