The Linux coders turning the ROG Ally and other handhelds into Steam Deck clones

'As soon as I was done with my review of the Asus ROG Ally, I grabbed my best USB stick and started looking for ISOs to download. Windows is, of course, the main highway to most PC gaming, but it's also (as detailed in the review) not yet built to work well on a 7-inch gaming handheld. The ROG Ally ships with Windows (Home) installed and a bunch of Asus software, but it is still, at heart, a PC. With effort, you can get into the BIOS, disable Secure Boot, plug in a USB stick, and boot a USB stick with a live Linux distribution on it. [...] With Ubuntu 23.04 installed, I could run the Phoronix Test Suite and run glxgears, which showed that at least some kind of 3D acceleration was happening. I installed Cyberpunk 2077 through Steam's Proton compatibility tool, benchmarked it, and got, well, very sad numbers. Cyberpunk saw that my GPU was the Ally's key feature—an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme. But it ran at 17 and 23 frames per second averages on "Medium" and "Steam Deck" settings, respectively (at 720p resolution and 60 Hz refresh rate). With nothing to lose, I installed the latest AMD Linux drivers, ran those benchmarks again, and lo and behold, improvement: 30.8 and 27.32 fps on "Medium" and "Steam Deck." That's notably shy of the 38 and 34 frames per second I clocked on the same benchmark in Windows. Then again, I'm guessing at drivers, and I can't do much to control thermals or power draw.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/the-linux-coders-turning-the-rog-all... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Wed, 28 Jun 2023 08:52:06 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:
Windows is, of course, the main highway to most PC gaming, but it's also (as detailed in the review) not yet built to work well on a 7-inch gaming handheld.
And what is the Steam Deck? It is a Linux-based gaming PC from Valve <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/steam-deck-the-comprehensive-ars-technica-review/>, <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/linux-on-steam-deck-what-you-need-to-know-what-currently-works/>. It may not (yet) be fully-compatible with every Steam game intended for Windows, but it offers a purpose-built UI for the handheld form factor. Microsoft is making noises about offering such a UI for Windows <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/handheld-mode-for-windows-could-make-it-work-better-on-steam-deck-style-pcs/>, but so far it’s just vapourware. Think of the ROG Ally is an attempt to compete with the Steam Deck, hobbled by the limitations of Windows.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann