this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Biggest improvement is probably the 30-50% increase in battery life. The deck already gets much better battery life than the ROG Ally or Lenovo Go (especially on low demanding games, it can get 2-4x the battery life), so this will further cement it as the best handheld PC for actually playing without the device plugged in.
That's mostly because it's significantly less powerful. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, it's just a different approach to mobile gaming.
I'm usually not far from a power cable/outlet, and I usually stream from desktop at home, so power consumption isn't an issue for me, personally.
I mean running the same game at the same settings/resolution/etc the Deck will get significantly better battery life. You can offset this somewhat by using task manager to close background processes in windows, but it still takes a lot more power to run stuff on the ROG Ally than the deck.
An example from Ally reviews was Stardew valley ran at 6-8w on the deck, but was pulling 16-20w on the Ally with same settings. Using task manager to close windows processes for the Ally down to the 12-15w range, but that's still a huge jump. This isn't even taking into consideration that you can tweak deck performance settings to run Stardew valley at a much lower power setting, I've seen people go as low as 3.8w giving them 10+ hours of battery life.
Yes, that is, as I said, because it is much less powerful.