It’s a massive 105-minute DF Direct Weekly landing today, with myself, John and Alex discussing reactions to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, along with some follow-ups on John’s coverage last week. We also discuss the fact that Sharp is providing a new display for an as-yet unannounced console (Switch 2?) while we also give a preview of sorts to A Plague Tale: Requiem’s new 60fps performance mode. How did Asobo deliver this and to what extent is it really running at 60 frames per second? We’ll have more on that later this week, but just remember – there’s no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to real-time rendering and we’re just looking at rendering resolution reductions here. Regardless, 60fps was the key demand from many console gamers and it’s great to see the developer respond.
The focus of this blog post concerns the Asus ROG Ally – and why we didn’t have a review on embargo last week. Essentially, there seems to be an issue with my unit where the 15W performance mode runs significantly more slowly than it should when it is plugged into the mains – and bearing in mind that battery life is at a premium on this machine, that’s how I benched it. Just as I finished my review, various Ryzen 7840U benchmarks emerged that seemed somewhat at odds with my results, which shouldn’t be happening as the ROG Ally’s Z1 Extreme should be on par or better than the results I was getting.
Through a process of trial and error, I eventually found out that on my unit at least, running it from mains in the 15W mode impeded performance, while removing the power cable instantly gave me a circa 18-20 percent frame-rate boost, making the results much more plausible and requiring a full re-test of the 15W performance preset. This is all the more bizarre as in its high-power turbo mode, plugging the unit into the mains increases performance as it should. I’ve been talking to Asus about this and hopefully a new unit will be heading my way but my 3DMark results do seem close enough to theirs in the reviewers’ guide, so I’m fairly confident that my new ‘from battery’ 15W benchmarks are accurate.
00:00:00 Introduction00:01:04 News 01: Tears of the Kingdom launches!00:26:05 News 02: Sharp producing next-gen Switch LCD?00:34:49 News 03: ASUS ROG Ally reviews drop + our impressions00:50:20 News 04: A Plague Tale: Requiem gets 60fps patch00:56:36 News 05: John gets a new CRT!01:02:53 Supporter Q1: With low sales and poor software support, where does the PS VR2 go from here?01:07:36 Supporter Q2: Could DF revisit some of the recent troubled PC ports and see how they run now after patches?01:11:23 Supporter Q3: Why does DLSS 3 produce a smoother experience in games with high CPU load?01:15:47 Supporter Q4: Developers like to blame specific PC configurations for user issues. Could DF emphasize that PC performance issues are often common to all configurations?
I’m going to double-check my new results with a second unit, but it seems to me that the claims circulating pre-launch about a 50 percentage point performance upgrade at 15W and a doubling of performance at max power are not quite accurate. In fact, different games produce different results – as you might expect. Below, you’ll see the best scaling I achieved up against the Steam Deck in Forza Horizon 5. There’s a circa 29 to 33 percentage point increase in performance up against Steam Deck at 15W, but the turbo modes take that to the next level – albeit with a tremendous impact to battery life that essentially rules out the Ally as a liveable handheld machine.