While the recently-unveiled handheld gaming systems Asus ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X are quite impressive when it comes to hardware, the fact that they use an LCD screen rather than a more premium OLED display has been noteworthy. In a recent video (as caught by WCCFTech), Asus senior manager of marketing content for gaming, Whitson Gordon, explained that the decision came down to power usage.
In the stream, Gordon said that while Asus loves making use of OLED displays, especially with its line-up of premium PC monitors, the company decided to go with LCD displays for the handheld systems because features like variable refresh rate (VRR) weren’t possible without sacrificing battery life.
“We did some R&D and prototyping with OLED, but it’s still not where we want it to be when you factor VRR into the mix and we aren’t willing to give up VRR,” said Gordon. “I’ll draw that line in the sand right now. I am of the opinion that if a display doesn’t have variable refresh rate, it’s not a gaming display in the year 2025 as far as I’m concerned, right? That’s a must-have feature, and OLED with VRR right now draws significantly more power than the LCD that we’re currently using on the Ally and it costs more.”
Gordon also spoke about how OLED displays, due to their premium nature, also tend to cost more to use in manufacturing systems. This means that when the product hits store shelves, it will also end up having a higher price tag. He noted that, since the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X will likely not end up as the primary gaming platform for most buyers, both of the handhelds still have to be priced reasonably.
“When we look at what people are buying in the handheld market right now, both in terms of the sales of our devices and what we see from competitors, it’s pretty clear what price bands people are willing to buy a device like this in, because remember, it’s a secondary device for a lot of people,” explained Gordon. “It’s not their primary device. I see a lot of people in feedback saying that they want this exact thing. They say, “I don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for this.” Well, yeah, we don’t want that either. That’s why we’re trying to avoid having it cost an arm and a leg by not putting things in that the vast majority of users don’t need. We’re trying to hit a reasonable price point on these.”
“That’s all I’ll say about price. You have to align your expectations with the market and what we’re doing here. Adding 32GB, OLED, Z2 Extreme, and all of those extra bells and whistles would cost a lot more than the price bracket you guys are used to on the Ally, and the vast majority of users are not willing to pay that kind of price.”
When it comes to the software side of things, Microsoft Gaming boss Phil Spencer recently noted that the gaming-oriented version of Windows running on both of the handhelds was the result of the “tightest collaboration” between Microsoft’s gaming and Windows divisions that he had seen in his 30 years at the company.
For more details about the hardware powering both the ROG Xbox Ally and the ROG Xbox Ally X, check out our coverage of the announcement. And in the meantime, here’s just about everything else that you might have missed about the systems.
