The ROG Ally is not just your average handheld gaming device, it is a high-performance game emulation platform as well. Its powerful Ryzen Z1 custom APU, which is based on AMD Zen4 “Phoenix” silicon, comes with AVX512 instruction support. This means that many emulation engines can make use of the extended 256-bit SIMD vector extensions, which include advanced operations like data conversion, scatter operations, and permutations. These types of operations are commonly utilized by emulators and can significantly benefit from AVX512 instruction support, resulting in a significant boost in performance.
ETA Prime put the latest handheld console to the test and found that it’s more than capable of running almost all popular emulators. The console delivers higher resolution and framerate than what’s typical, and all of this is done while using very low power.
Even PS3 games, which are notoriously difficult to emulate, can be played on the console. In a video, the YouTuber demonstrated the console running God of War smoothly at 50-60 frames per second with 1080p resolution. However, this game requires more power to run, about 25-30 watts. Other games can be capped at 30 frames per second and native resolution, allowing them to run smoothly on only 7 to 15 watts of power, which should result in longer battery life for the console.
The console has been verified to support several popular emulators, including PlayStation 3 (RPCS3), Nintendo Switch (YUZU), Xbox 360 (CXBX), 3DS (Citra), PSP (PPSSPP), GameCube (Dolphin), PS2 (PSX2), and WiiU (CEMU).
The ASUS ROG Ally is equipped with an 8-core Zen4 APU and a built-in RDNA3 GPU that has 12 Compute Units and can reach a maximum boost of 2.7 GHz. While the console does come at a steep price of $699, it allows gamers to consolidate their favorite games into one portable device. For those who don’t mind splurging, the ROG XG RTX 4090 external GPU (which costs around $2000) could also be an option, although it hasn’t been tested with an emulator yet.
Via Tom’s Hardware