Steam Deck Ray Tracing vs Asus ROG Ally: It Works But Should You Use It?
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- Опубликовано: 31 май 2024
- With meagre power budgets and sub-Xbox Series S performance, ray tracing is going to be simply too much for PC handhelds like Steam Deck or Asus ROG Ally, right? Right? It turns out that decent results are possible! In this video, Oliver Mackenzie looks at a range of RT titles on Steam Deck, stacks up SteamOS RT vs Windows 11 and brings in the powerhouse that is the Asus ROG Ally to see how much performance improves still further.
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00:00 Overview
01:16 Steam Deck
07:10 ROG Ally and Windows testing
12:10 Analysis and conclusion 
Игры
Wow, I'm surprised ray-tracing is playable at all on a handheld.
The thing that really holds these SoCs back is the anemic memory bandwidth. If you can give the gpu something it needs to really work on, the memory bus doesn't hamper as much.
@@lucimon97yeah most games nowadays require more than 8gb of ram and vram. That shared ram of 16gb isn't cut out for most modern games.
@@arclight7892I would say if it is gddr it would suffice, not lpddr.
@@arclight7892 The interesting thing is that the AMD based handhelds with 32 and 64gb of RAM doesn't really get that much better performance than the 16GB AMD devices. Keep in mind both PS5 and Xbox Series X run on 16GB shared memory as well. So current games will be targeted to run on 12-16GB for a little while longer.
indeed, if you trace few enough rays, ray tracing is playable on any hardware
I can't get enough of Steam Deck stuff from DF. More pleaseeeeee
Asus ROG Ally vs Steam Deck comparison should be in every Digital Foundry review. This will give us optimized games and better hardware drivers
Alan Wake 2 turned into a 1992 Police Quest FMV on the Ally lol
wow, someone mentioned Swat 1 - Police Quest xD
What a load of crap. Alan Wake can barely run on the Steamdeck. But, he is using the steam well stamping the Rog Alley label. What a lie.
@@2ndAmendmenttime You sound mad, and based on your avatar and name, stay mad?
@@2ndAmendmenttime it barely runs on the Rog ally as well, Alan Wake 2 brings desktop gaming PC's to their knees, handhelds aren't powerful enough to run it with Ray Tracing.
1999 survival horro game Nocturne. have better effects than ray tracing alan wake 2. look better.
Two things:
1. I love Oliver's continued coverage of the Deck
2. I love his use of the word "haircut"
that is all
you missed one point: how satisfying is Oliver's voice
It really sounds like he doesn’t like rog ally a 5 times difference and he doesn’t even sound happy or excited.
@@realtalkrealthingsent.8024 lol 5 times difference? 😂
The Deck is a mediocre portable gaming device made for tinkerers, not gamers. It's niche and has no place on a gaming channel.
What an amazing device Steam Deck is. Purchased one more than a year ago and still consider it one of my best decisions regarding gaming. In fact it was my entry device for pc gaming, after that i sold my ps5 and made a 3080 build to combine it with the SD.
Same, i have a 4080 Super and 13700k but i'm still playing a lot ob my steam deck, especially 16:9 games. Because my main monitor is 21:9.
Wow that's a really cool intro to PC gaming! How did you get interested in the steam deck if you weren't a PC gamer? DigitalFoundry?
@@BrecklynFast Sometimes I stay at my girlfriend's for a week. I used to carry my laptop to work and my PS5 to play. It seemed like a good idea to buy a steam deck, the dock and a keyboard, and do remote gaming through chiaky. That way I wouldn't have to carry so many things. I eventually started buying my games on Steam and finally sold the PS5. Maybe i should have just used chiaky trough my laptop, i suppose that i was just trying to convince myself to buy a steam deck. But anyway i fell in love with SD versatility.
Good choice selling the PS5. Sony is a horrible company, and their refund for PlayStation makes that oh so evident.
@@Game4LordThat’s a stretch. They have negative areas like every company but overall PlayStation have been making decisions that people want to see in gaming. They’ve made games that are varied and have strong visions.
I was shocked when I turned on RT in Spider-Man on my ROG Ally. Set the DRS target for 30fps and the upscaled resolution as 720p and it actually held it, with decent image quality.
I didn't keep it on since it made the base resolution lower and the framerate wasn't as good. RT off let the framerate stay high enough that the VRR screen just did its thing.
Something to note. Steam Deck by default uses Mesa driver library, a community maintained GPU driver library for specific vendors and its recommended for AMD and Intel GPUs, former of which works better than manufacturer's own driver on non-Windows platform. Here in the raytracing case its still in rather infancy as some major improvements happened like a year ago, imo this is due to the fact that raytracing is still a niche.
But on the other hand it may be good enough compared to other drivers once RT becomes more common.
@@kadupse Now, now. I've said that the driver library when it comes to raytracing is still in infancy on Mesa so there may be a case where its AMD's own driver that don't do a good job with raytracing.
@@kadupse There's always going to be someone who will.
Heck a few years ago someone decided to update the driver for ATI Rage 128 GPU and someone else is working on a Vulkan driver for Radeon 6000 HD series.
@@kadupseagreed that AMD should switch to dedicated raytracing cores in future cards, but AMD aren't that far behind Nvidia even without those cores. The real magic Nvidia has is their upscalers. Those in concert with the rt cores work wonders. AMD is behind, but it's not like raytraced titles are unplayable with their cards!
Cp2077 path tracing is a mod made by Nvidia with Nvidia hardware and optimizations in mind. Its not a good judge of the performance difference. Its still there but not nearly as large. @@kadupse
@@KayX291even if the drivers became much better, the hardware just isn't powerful enough. Memory bandwidth and RT core limitations will always hold it back and tank performance.
The tradeoff is not worth it on the Steam Deck. Image quality wasn't great to begin with
It's only worth it if you know what you're doing, I use a FSR 2 mod to get Doom Eternal to upscale to 1080p which looks better than the 720p they're running at
"Image quality wasn't great to begin with" ... in deed: it is! Especially on such a small screen in games like DOOM Eternal or Forza Horizon.
@@hassosigbjoernson5738 games made to run on toasters don't count.
Loving the handheld videos you guys keep em coming
While I might not own a Steam Deck yet, I enjoy the coverage! Thanks for the testing Oliver!
I would not bother with RT on a handheld, personally.
Same, we need at least double the Z1 extreme/7840u performance before RT can be used effectively on a handheld with decent performance.
@@Saif0412I probably will prefer framerates and resolition even with triple the performance.
Guessing next gen handhelds will mostly be 8" screens.
I have a rtx 3070 I don't bother using rt. Most of the time it's not worth it halve your performance
I got a 4090 cause, to be honest, I love me some RT/PT.
Why would I not like some better lighting and actual reflections.
But using it on my ROG, would be a no.
Maybe with whatever comes after strix halo on 2nm, it will be worth it (in games like doom 😂, not cyberpunk). That will hopefully be 2.5+x performance of the z2 extreme if the processor also uses less power.
I wish you guys have taken a proper look at Talos Principle 2, beyond its tutorial area. The game is beautifully looking, with all the latest UE5 features and large richly detailed environments. And FSR2 and 3 support makes it possible to run the game with playable frame rate on a Steam Deck.
Fsr 3 under anything below 30fps base is not worth it at all
@@xtr.7662You’re right in principle, but I would argue that a slow paced meditative puzzle game is one of rare exceptions to this rule
@@Shantara11 nah then youd be better off just not using it fsr 3 wont make 20fps to 40fps feeling
@@xtr.7662from my experience it is always unplayable. The frame pacing makes it feel like half the native framerate
@@Shantara11 I tried out FSR3 to interpolate 30FPS to 60FPS in Talos Principle 2 a while back on my RTX 3060 Ti, and it was the worst input lag I've ever experienced in a game. Even for a slower-paced puzzle game like this, it was completely unacceptable. It was extremely noticeable even when using a controller. Playing at 30FPS natively (which is how I played the game in my first play-through) felt WAY more responsive than the fake 60FPS. AMD themselves strongly recommend using it when you can ensure a minimum frame rate of 55FPS, and after trying it out, I can see exactly why.
With that said, it works pretty well when generating 120FPS from 60FPS. The image does look more noticeably more fluid while the input lag isn't that much worse even when using a keyboard and mouse. But yeah, I can't recommend using FSR3 in the game if you can't maintain 60FPS at minimum. The only times I can say it might be acceptable is if it's a turn based game, a point-and-click or maybe a visual novel, but that's about it.
I just purchased an OLED steam deck last night and it should be here either end of the week or early next.
I had the LCD one and sold it to my boss who doesn't game much but wanted it. Excited to get the OLED one in. I got a bunch of games I wanna play on it.
Enjoy it's a nice piece of tech.
It’s miles better imo
Honestly surprising the results are as good as they are on Deck. When Deck 2 comes around years from now things are gonna be lookin nice for RT on handhelds.
We need Gddr6 System memory on these handhelds and 32GB. So we can use 8 for vram and have great bandwidth then up the CUs from 12 to 20 and lower clocks on CPU to save power we would have something so great. But CPUs can’t interface with GDDR6 is the main thing here. LODDR5X at 7500 is the best tech we have at the moment.
I love seeing this stuff and I don't even have a Deck. Good content team, keep it up.
Awesome video!!!
Awesome. More Steam Deck content please :) Thanks Oliver!
The large perf difference between the devices when using / not using RT is due to memory bandwidth bottlenecking. RT uses comparatively more compute and therefore benefits more from higher compute of the Ally. Try limiting GPU clock without RT, nothing will happen at first until the bandwidth can saturate the compute.
It's crazy how these 15w devices are on pair with my my 2500k and GTX1060 that easily draws 4-500w.
That's way more power than I thought. The GTX 1060 laptop I own only needs 180w power supply and the 1060 laptop and desktop are pretty much identical. Also my current 3060 laptop may draw 200w at most
I suggest you actually measure with a wattmeter ;)
1060 draws ~120W, 2500k (stock) draws less than 100W at least in games. Your whole system power for full load is probably below 300W.
There is no way your 1060 and 2500k draws 400w
That Alan Wake footage at 10m is like nightmare fuel, looks like an old PS1 cut scene
Now this is a good informative video, thanks
I just bought a Legion Go, keep up the gaming handheld vids, love it
How do you like it, no OLED screen therefore no HDR , would be nice to have those
@olevet75 The Screen is fantastic, the size of it really immerses you in the game, I just finishes Stray on it, beautiful game.
Thank you for the Steam Deck videos, they are all very helpful and enjoyable to me.
Another excellent video. I would love to see more PC handheld coverage on the channel!
Loving the Steam Deck videos. I adore my steam deck oled.
Raytracing support on Switch 2 will be just be a bullet point on the box. Even if it'll be faster than what was shown here, I doubt it'll be usable at good looking resolutions.
Considering some multiplat titles, like Control, will take at least half a year to get a Switch 2 port (more likely one to six years from Switch 1 experience) and some will never get a Switch 2 port at all, UMPCs are still the best option for multiplat games.
@@Sly2Cooper But that was because the Switch was hopelessly weak. Only extraordinary developers could make complex games work well (ok it was not hopeless I guess). So it depends on if Nintendo learned their lesson and will have a stronger device at launch. Nvidia had enough time to create hardware and software optimized for handheld gaming, such as dedicated machine learning upscaling algorithms.
The situation with Switch 2 could be different, but if Nintendo is doing Nintendo things and release a weak hardware again, well then history will repeat. But future history is not written yet. So don't write it off too early...
Switch 2 will probably be 720p or 1080p at the most. Nintendo are always VERY backwards when it comes to hardware.
@@thingsiplay I was not talking about new games I was referring to OLDER games like Bioshock or Batman. It took only 6 years to get a mere Batman. Considering that noname devices like ones from GPD got those games years before Switch, despite their tiny sales. And many great games from PS360 era still didn't recieve Switch ports at all.
After playing on platforms like Steamdeck, I don't want to return to years of potentially futile waiting for a port, while I can get them right away on other handheld. Why bother? Just to please Nintendo? That was the problem I was talking to.
For big titles like Control it will take at least a year for a port just because 3rd parties will wait untill decent install base for Switch 2. And when that hypothetical Control will come out on Switch it still will cost a full price, while on PC it will be like $10 on a sale.
And what about games like Halo or Spider Man?
So Steamdeck and other UMPCs are way better for multiplat games. Because of price, time, wider choice (and I'm not even talking about access to all legacy platforms and their whole libraries via emulation right away).
True, Switch 2 will be for Nintendo exclusives. But for 3rd party multiplatform on the go it will still be a worse choice.
@@Sly2Cooper You forget that these ports where done from vastly complicated and different hardware, when Switch support was not well on development tools. Now this has matured and if Switch 2 is a continuation of the Switch, plus with the expertise from developers learned from Switch 1 and the development tools improvements, plus the driver and software improvements by Nvidia as well.
That's why you can't just apply the same logic from Switch 1 to Switch 2. If the new hardware is something like Nintendo DS to Nintendo 3DS.
When I was a kid I used to say " the future will be when a Super Nintendo fits in your pocket."
And now we live in a world where Ray tracing can be done on a handheld device. It's just nuts.
I remember 13/14 years ago as a young teen being completely broke and BARELY being able to play GTA III at more than 15 FPS on a PC i built from salvaging parts from dumpsters and recycling centers.
Now, I can play GTA V on the go. Crazy.
Oliver, please cover ROG Ally running Bazzite (SteamOS) vs the Deck and also comparing performance to Windows (overall FPS, stutter struggle, frame times consistency, built in FSR, etc). Would make for a very interesting video.
would love to see this
I’m confused. The labels state “Steam Deck OLED Native 720P” but the OLED’s native resolution is 800P. So are the samples upscaled from 720P or should the label read 800P?
Edit: for example at 3:48
It's a taller aspect ratio. So if you run a game at 720p it'll still be technically at the native resolution of the screen, it'll just have black bars on the top and bottom
I think the point is less that the game output matches the decks resolution, and more that the internal resolution and output resolution match. In that sense, you could do native 1080p despite the screen, or native 720p on an external display of another resolution.
I played through Doom Eternal in its entirety on the Deck and it's mind-blowing how well it runs on this thing, but the ray tracing isn't worth the performance penalty. You want high frame-rates in this game and RT will force you to cap it at 30fps.
As for Persona 3, certain areas in the game become a literal slide show with RT.
Haven't tried the other games in this video but I'm pleased to see that Crysis 2 seems viable at 40fps with RT.
But overall you'll want to keep RT off on the Deck.
The OLED Deck is still one of the best gaming hardware purchases I've ever made though and I've been gaming since the 80's. Can't recommend it enough. I've barely used anything else since I bought it.
Honestly just using GeForce Now will look and run much better....
Exactly, GeForce Now kinda makes the Steam Deck vs Ally argument invalid.
Combining Steam Deck OLED with GFN Ultimate is 🧑🍳😘
I kinda wish Persona just had some planar reflections to fall back on.
That way you could have the nice, complete feeling, environments and not take a big hit to performance.
I wonder if you could have planar reflections mixed with RT for characters, just a simple two bounce. Don't know how feasible that it.
Heck the way Personas camera is pre-placed, just some cube maps could have been enough to look good. Even if only in key locations.
I don't get why it's so hard to run even contro.rt runs better
6:00 It's actually so funny to see the Frame-rate range at only 20-0fps. lol
Only setting that gets 30fps is RT local shadows on Steam Deck, that's basically just the RT low preset and is used on consoles for the same reason
I'm surprised Digital Foundry hasn't done any content on Lossless Scaling Frame Generation which adds frame generation to all games and emulators.
love my release day Ally, it's saved my butt when my pc stopped booting
I like to have the option but because I mostly play games that are more chill like Palia or Stardew I don't think I will ever turn it on for something more demanding. It's definitely a super cool technology and I can't wait for what Valve will cook for us in 2nd deck, we got a lot to look for
I am in a dilemma which one to buy I have a massive PC library on Different store platforms and don't want to be limited by one. But I really like the simplified software on Steam Deck and overall filling on hand.
its pretty easy to setup all the 3rd party stores on steamOS with just running a script from github
The fact that RT works AT ALL on the Steam Deck is... enough for me :D (My RTX 2080 Super still has can't give 30 FPS on 720p on a PC.. the fact that it runs at all on handheld is insane!)
Rtx 2080 can not do 30fps on 720p with rt ???
Thats a big lie
@@killermoon635 yes you are correct. I was talking about Alan wake 2 with Path tracing. At 720p, no upscaling I get around 24-28 😂.
Normal Raytracing effects are working a lot better obviously
Wish Valve made the Deck available worldwide. The import prices of the base OLED are higher than a Rog Ally in my country
Same in mine too.
In the remaster of the layers of fear game ray tracing works really well on both of these
Test AMFM in rog ally...
FPS boost!
Perfect!
I'm still fascinated by how a small motherboard like the Steam Deck’s can play games like these. I wish PC hardware would innovate further with even smaller form factor computers instead of continuing to create larger-sized hardware like GPUs as is common today.
That's why we got the 8000g series APUs for desktops, the iGPUs have the performance of a 1060
I will sometimes have rune tracer on the deck when playing Vampire Survivors.
RT is a significant performance hit on desktops too, I just don't bother with it. I've tried it and to be honest the effect is mostly wasted in the vast majority of games as you're concentrating on the action.
It's not as bad on Nvidia cards. Intel also is pretty good
It's neat to see RT working on a handheld at all but the fps drop even in performance mode is just not worth it for the level of RT on display. I tried it on Crysis 2 Remastered and it's very low res, smeary, and you'll be all over a 30-50fps range. Maybe Steam Deck 2.
Thanks Oliver, really interesting video. More handheld content please DF!
I just got my Steam Deck OLED in the mail and have been really digging it so far, but I've mainly only played indie titles. Dave the Diver and Hades look and play AMAZING on the OLED. But if I want to play more AAA and AA games from within the past 5 or so years, should I have gotten the ROG Ally instead?
The Ally just kind of seems to defeat the purpose of a portable handheld with its considerably worse battery life than the SD. But then again, that extra power really seems noticeable
The Ally is technically the more powerful machine, but in my opinion, you picked the right choice going with the Deck. The battery life I've seen with the ROG Ally is absolutely abysmal. Some of the higher end titles you can barely get an hour out of. I could be misled and the battery life could be decent with lower-end titles, but time and time again comparisons have proved that the deck simply has better battery life across the board.
If you are okay with locking some games to 30FPS or lowering graphics settings, you should have a decent time with the deck.
I wonder how much more rt performance the deck has on the table given how much it has already improved. I hope it feels like a worthy trade of in a least some titles in the future.
I like playing this caliber of tittle on my deck, and I don't think these games are ill fitted to handhelds at all, but their rt modes surely are borderline unusable
There was a major update to raytracing performance in the amd linux radv earlier this year that mostly brought it up to par with amd drviers on windows, idk if SteamOS has updated to the version of the drivers that include that or not yet (and also releveant whether it was when this video was made). Can't find what mesa version it's on. The amd linux graphics drivers are still under heavy development though so there are still performance improvents being made all the time.
@@olnnnWas hoping control rt would be doable it's close but no cigar on deck
I think there's still a lot of room for improvement. I have an Rx 6700 xt and it feels like every quarterly mesa release there's at least some improvement to ray tracing performance with radv, either across the board or with individual titles. With the current stable mesa branch (24.0) Ghostwire Tokyo in particular had a massive performance uplift, taking it from a game that was barley playable with low rt settings at very low internal resolutions to one that can be comfortably run on medium rt settings with TSR set to balanced on a 1440p monitor.
It sounds like the next branch, 24.1, is going to improve frame times by around 0.5ms across the board, which may not sound like much, but could be significant for titles that already perform well like quake II rtx.
It has exactly none, as it is the weakest RT gpu in the world (bar smartphone ones)
I'm yet to see any example when enabling RT is worth it for the performance hit. I just don't get it.
It just depends on the game and GPU you have
Same. Hybrid RT and even CP2077 type path tracing is overhyped. The only titles where I have seen RT actually make a huge difference in is actually older games like Quake, Portal, Doom and Minecraft etc. ALTHO they require textures and asset rework in addition to adding Path Tracing to actually give those wow visuals.
Two years of blissful gaming on my Steam Deck!😃
Please keep the Steam Deck content coming, DF!
Can you guys cover the deck with fo76?it would also probably please the algorithm gods too.
Would you recommend playing a game at lower settings WITH ray tracing, or higher settings WITHOUT ray tracing? (Assuming those two options produce the same frame rate)
I didn't know Ray Tracing was possible on the Deck. Trying this out now!
iirc it was enabled system-wide, so I think any game now works with RT. Haven't tried it myself though.
Metro Exodus has a sacrifice on the Series S, but reaches 60 fps with Ray Tracing on the console, which could show that the console has potential for some games with Ray Tracing.
Yeah, the RT drivers on Linux are a bit of a mess. As someone that uses a RX 6800 on Linux, sometimes I would get better performance or same on Linux, but in many cases like Cyberpunk much worse than Windows. I find myself switching between the OSes sometimes because of this. RADV (the Vulkan driver) needs better RT support, already fairly close though just needs some tweaks I think to juice out some extra frames. However, the one case I did have better performance was Control, but not with the RADV driver instead I used AMDVLK and that for some reason gave me a much more consistent experience in the areas you said caused frame drops, instead of like 30 FPS in those areas I would get 50 FPS where Windows would give the same as RADV at around 30 FPS. Cyberpunk in my experience was also quite poor with RADV so I just used Windows, the game wouldn't run with AMDVLK. the AMDVLK driver is generally worse, but in RT seems like in some edge cases it might have a slight edge over RADV and maybe some of that could be ported over to RADV and heck even the Windows driver
why on earth would anyone put all details on low only to be able to play a game with rt?! so you can enjoy reflections of muddy looking textures and low poly objects?😂
PS2 models and textures with ray traced reflections? Sure why not lol
RTGI would be worth the trade-off imo. I mean look at Quake RT, that looks great. But either way, this isn't the main point of the video i don't think, it's just about seeing what the devices are capable of.
@@sistockbridge8764 Yeah I wouldn’t mind having muddy textures and low polygon models if we get some good quality path tracing from it
When you depend on generosity of Nvidia, you have to promote b.s that only makes sense to other crazies.
I would like to see you guys putting a modded Steam OS on the ASUS Ally and see how it compares.
You mean Bazzite. Generally performance is close to identical
@@crestofhonor2349 maybe. My brother run it on his. I know from watching GN and DF the Ally has some pacing issues so would like there opinions.
In terms of platform support, is it sensible to buy a Steam Deck in 2024, or should a person wait until the Steam Deck 2.0?
Steam Deck 2 is probably a few more years out. If you're interested, I would just get one now.
Absolutely now. There's at LEAST another year and a half before another Deck, and the more they sell the more developers will create Deck-specific settings to make their games run as well as possible.
If you want to play games now, just buy one. There's always something better coming down the line. But keep in mind that it's absolutely pushed to it's limit when it comes to brand new AAA titles. Devices like Rog Ally can handle new AAA titles fairly well, but will also start to struggle soon I think.
I run a RTX 4090 as my main PC and still use my Deck almost every day. It is absolutely worth it now, especially if you play more than just brand new AAA games.
There's still no amd chip that can beat the deck in its entire power range, so a new deck is at least a new amd release away, possibly more (given they seem to have more of a console minded mentality, and less of a pc mentality). I would just get an oled deck
Would have been cool to see you set the TDP on the ROG ALLY to match the steam deck!
He did match it. Anything labeled performance mode matches the Deck. The Deck maxes at 15w and the performance mode on the Ally is 15w. I heavily doubt the deck was running at under 15w with any of these titles
@@crestofhonor2349 Ally performance drops hard under 15 tdp. The deck performance drops very little between 10-12 tdp vs 15 tdp just like the Ally performance drops a little from 30 tdp to 25 tdp.
I play the deck over 90% of the time at 10 tdp which increases battery life. This is where the deck outperforms the other handhelds.
What about linux on ally? Would be great to see how linux performs on ally, because it hasn't got such problems with drivers on windows as steam deck
Can you make video about cyberpunk optimised settings again with last patch?
It would be nice to test gtx1080ti, gtx1660ti, rtx2070s rtx3060ti, rtx4060 rtx4070 and rx5700, rx6600, rx6700, rx7700, rx7800....
considering this is hardware RT. software RT like lumen or SVOGI would be interesting. even games like teardown. software voxel RT.
Teardown never needed RT hardware due to how it calculates RT. It's similar to how Minecraft Java edition does RT shaders as none of those require RT hardware. Voxels are very interesting when it comes to software RT.
Ah, surprised there is a big difference comparatively the performance between the deck and rog ally at 15 watts is similar but with ray tracing on the rog ally is a lot faster might be due to the cpu and rdna 3. Ray tracing looks a lot more viable on the rog ally. Or other gaming handhelds with the z1 extreme.
Funny that the only games where i would turn raytracing ON are the ones that can't hold at least 30fps like Control and Cyberpunk 2077 because the pacing allows you to stop and notice the difference, DOOM Eternal is too frenetic for this and same goes for Crysis 2 to a less extent.
I too might turn it on in Cyberpunk but I wouldn't use the RT reflections. I'd use either of the shadow settings personally
More steam deck videos please DF
The ROG is such a beast for a handheld.
Love my Steam Deck OLED so much, but I really don't think I'll ever need or want to implement ray tracing on it.
Neat/5. ROG Ally still isn’t great, but it’s the best of the bunch so far. More interested in how iPad M3 will fare when AAA games hit it en masse, assuming it’s going to happen.
HA, personally I would not bother with real RT on 4080 or below. On a 4090 (~%1500-%2000 the steamdeck GPU performance), I would say its debatable :) The effect is just too subtle for too high of a cost in the vast majority.
Yep even after 6 years after its introduction, Its still a waste of sillicon space for %99 people.
If people agreed with you and truly believed that they would all buy AMD hardware. As AMD is more performant in raster and generally can be run at native res rather than using upscaling making DLSS moot for hardware that roughly costs the same amounts.
But people don’t. There is more control as noted in this video. Most people will want to tweak their RT visuals and not simply run “zero” or “ultra” but something in between to get good FPS with an IQ boost. Which again ironically AMD also does well in.
I’d watch Daniel Owen for this kind of info because his testing often reflects that mindset of picking settings that people would actually play at to hit a reasonable frame rate target.
Even on a 4080 or 4090 it’s just not worth it lol.
I think it's fine on my RTX 3060 in some games. It just depends
@@JeremiahBostwick I buy Nvidia graphics cards for virtually every other feature than RT. DLSS can be considered "free performance", as the image quality is damn near native. FSR on the other hand; terrible.
*exclusively playing 2D Indi titles on my Steamdeck on the Chouch*, ohh ,it can do raytracing, too =D
Video shows: it all comes down to optimization, as always!
And the comparison to Series S shows: devs often seem to not care about optimization, although the hardware would be capable of more.
Maybe this is an advantage with such hardware limited devices like Steam Deck that Series S doesn't have: toggles and graphic settings within games. With that there comes the option to turn RT on in the first place. But on the other hand we should remember: that is exactly what console players don't want: dial into settings and try out. It's all about being ready to play from minute one after download.
It would have been interesting to see comparable footage of that Avatar segment from Series S as well. And it would have been interesting to know how short that ROG Ally stays in business with those setting and Turbo mode on. Is it more than 40 minutes? Otherwise very interesting stuff in this video!
Cheers!
Not the type of thing i would turn on but nice to see it working, sort of
Thankfully Valve like Nintendo is the kind of company that will prioritize the overall experience and a more budget price point so more people can get their hands on its hardware.
So no chance of your paymaster Nvidia ever being in a Steamdeck 2 or Steamdeck 3. The price would just shoot up to insanity for a handheld.
Asus and the kind of crazies it caters to as a brand tho... Who knows
I had a friend tell my they hate the Steam Deck because it didn't have an Nvidia GPU lol.
Nvidia left the low-power mobile GPU market because they simply couldn't compete lol
@@chitan1362they never made igpus
Metro Enhanced cripple my Steam Deck OLED. I deleted and Downloaded the regular version and it works fine. I
Sure I could mess with settings but that game looks good no matter what. And the screen is so small that Ray Tracing isn’t a game changer.
10:30 Oh the humanity
Mesh shaders?
We come a long way
This is cool, but I only play simpler games visually on my Steam Deck. Still, I've yet to find a game that is designed for a small screen. Their UI is too small.
It’s kinda funny, I don’t play a single RT game. Palworld doesn’t use it, Helldivers 2 doesn’t use it, Genshin Impact, PSO2NGS, Diva Meganix… hell, I just got back into Street Fighter 6 and I’m starting Tekken 8, neither of which use it. I gotta wonder when we’ll see a shift on it
Those are either lower budget or competitive titles where performance is prioritized, but it's no shock those are the only games you play as they are usually most popular, played and profitable games (I have a decent pc and I usually only play those types of games). I would only expect competitive/lower budget titles to get rt when the ps6 is out and most people have rt capable cards.
Most of those games wouldn't have used RT anyways. Pal world can be forced to have Lumen on and it does improve the image. Many of the other titles here either pre date RT, made for a platform that doesn't support it, or are competitive like SF6 and Tekken 8
@@crestofhonor2349 I think the online play has a lot more to do with it than anything else. PSO2 NGS launched almost a year after Xbox Series X/S, and Genshin Impact came out a month before PS5 (2 years after RTX cards). But all those games were also compatible with the prior consoles, so RT woulda been a large undertaking given the need to have a raster fall-back.
Palworld's Lumen hack is... less than ideal, insofar as it clashes with a lot of the game's existing workarounds for a raster pipeline. I turned it off after a week 'cause it looked kind of awful in too many places.
As for singleplayer games, I love Nintendo's library of games and no one can deny that games like Zelda are stunners visually too. None of them have RT but they are amazing too.
I have a ROG ally and never tried ray tracing on it. It’s been a pretty surprising little PC though and I definitely get my use out of it. I played it every night in my bed while my wife sleeps. This is a great life hack for married gamers whose wife wants to go to bed before 2 am. 😮
Anyone surprised how close the Deck is to the Ally in most games? What black magic did Valve put in this thing?
There is like double the performance on the ally at the same wattage with ray tracing. That isn’t close, that is a big difference, massive.
Without it it is similar but with ray tracing it is way different the steam deck is lagging quite a bit behind. It really isn’t close.
@@oo--7714 When plugged in in turbo mode. I only use my deck on battery. In that scenario they are very close.
@@oo--7714not same wattage it's only 5-25% percent be better at 15 watts you need 25-30 watts which would be like 50 minute to battery life and windows sucks.
@@AtomicTreeDudethat wasn't plugged in, they were at performance mode (15 watts like the steam deck) for a lot of the testing, it wasn't 5-25% with testing on this video it wad more 50% or above.
Only when ray tracing is switched off they are close looking at this video, rdna3 just seems to be a lot better with rt. On metro exodus on the ally at 15 watts the performance is 70% faster according to digital foundry that's massive 8:16 and 140% faster at 30 watts.
I have a steam deck but come I can see the difference is a bit massive
Solid performance from the rawg ally
Most dont use it on their €2000+ desktops.
So no, dont use it in this.
I swear tech guys on youtube (df guys also) dont seem to realise that most people dont give a shit about RT.
Lets have a poll FFS on who actually uses RT and put an end to this once and for all.
. If u dispute this comment, you are the minority and the minority are the most vocal.
Ive never met anyone that upgraded their PC for RT.
They did it for performance.
Who cares about RT will differ from more hardcore competitive gamers to more casual people. I personally love RT but I don't use it on a handheld at all except for Persona 3 Reload on the Ally. I don't think this is as one sided as you think. You can optimize it and not use all the RT settings on. Some games it's worth it and others it isn't. So even then it's going to change from game to game. Many people might test to see if the performance loss is worth it. Plus whether you have AMD, Intel, or Nvidia is likely going to effect your decision too
This doesn't bode well for Switch 2.
As expected, Rog Ally just kills the Steam Deck
The ROG Ally is a beast
I love Steam Deck content, but this seems like a weird avenue for investigation. Pushing portable devices in this way at the expense of frame rate, resolution and battery life seems like the opposite of an enjoyable experience. Anything under 30fps isn’t worth bothering with IMO.
I’ve owned all three, the Legion Go is the best of the bunch.
Legion Go has the same processor as the ally tho
@@KingVulpes bigger battery tho
@@oo--7714 that would help with that 25w tdp
No vrr, loud fan, poor UI, speakers that fire away from you & too heavy, but the screen is nice. Returned mine.
We also now have pathtracing, tho Portal RTX is really the only game that works on Deck rn
Minecraft RTX and Quake 2 RTX are other path tracing titles that came out before Portal RTX
@@crestofhonor2349 Ah, right, Quake 2 RTX also works well on Deck, I tried Minecraft but couldn't get it playable, and it won't work on Linux
@@KingVulpesquake 2 runs good if you set the resolution to 360p or less, which is pathetic.
@@niebuhr6197 I just use dynamic resolution for 800p and 1080p, TAA-U does a good enough job upscaling
@@niebuhr6197 I just use dynamic resolution for 800p and 1080p, works fine for a 30fps target
Why does the steam Deck not have 30W TDP?
Battery life.
Heat, someone unlocked it to 30w but it needed a fan dock
For what you pay the Deck really is a gem.
anbernic vs miyoo mini
Which one better?
Depends on which anbernic device you're comparing against the miyoo mini. I'd say RG35XX + vs Miyoo Mini + it's more for the Miyoo. If it's against the RG35XX H then the H wins
We need more fsr 3 game updates for rog ally😢
bought and sold steam deck last year
could not stand the small screen and low resolution
not that i did not know it had a small screen
but experiencing it myself turned out to be very disappointing
I wouldn't call
Elden Ring RT performance? Game runs good without it so it would be good to see as well.
Lol its another game in quite a long list where RT does litterally nothing to enhance the visual presentation.
Alan wake 2 and pandora doesn’t even run on my steam deck 😅
Need a steam deck 2 with half life 3 launch..
It’s crazy that just based off his voice, I can tell he’s got the worst sleep apnea imaginable.