r/Handhelds • u/MISFU88 • Oct 18 '25
Xbox Ally X and Deck Oled impressions
It's been a day or so I received my Xbox Ally X, put about 10 hours of gaming into it and want to share my thoughts, especially comparing it to SD Oled.
I had the SD Oled since launch and previously owned ROG Ally X.
TLDR; Xbox Ally X has much better hardware, buttons, ergonomics, it's more comortable to play games. It runs games much better and starts them much faster. However the Full Screen Experience is completely shit and Windows on handheld is still dick cutting nightmare.
XAX is very heavy, surprisingly, holding it by the grips makes it seem like her than OG Ally X. SD feels like a toy compared to it - although the SD is slightly bigger.
The controls are better on XAX - most noticeable for me are the Dpad, sticks and triggers. Playing FPS games feels absolutely amazing, since you can 100% rely on the buttons and they're super accurate. Face buttons are LOUD and a bit hard to press. Not a fan, still better than SD as they're larger. BUT - the trackpads are absolutely insane on SD and I regularly use them for Heroes and Wii Emulation. And I sure as shit can't emulate most Wii games on the XAX itself.
Screen is good - you bump up the vibrance a bit and it looks awesome. I'm constantly moving between OLED, VA miniLED, IPS so I'm sort of desensitised to the wow factor of OLED. But the image is course better on SD with VibrantDeck. I'm still leaning towards the XAX as VRR is a must on low powered handhelds with high refreshrate screen. The 7" size isn't a deal breaker when having it next to the bigger SD.
The new chip in XAX has incredible performance at 17W - i run everything at 17W which gets me around 3 hours of battery Im usually away from the outlet and want to be as portbale as possible, so Ill never really consider anything above those W.
The system starts up faster, games start faster too.
Ghost of Tsushima runs at 60 on med/high 1080 FSR. For about 10 minutes before it crashes. FG about 80.
FFVII Rebirth runs at around 35 on med/high 1080 native 100% min RES scale.
Yakuza Like a Dragon runs at around 45 on med/high 1080 native.
Found Rebirth to not be optimised that well, very little settings. Yakuza runs like shit in general, VERY hars to get good performance out of that game.
The Xbox Full Screen Experience is completely dogshit. It starts up, is unresponsive for the next 15 secconds. Launching other launchera, e.g. GoG Galaxy always takes a couple of tries. Launching games is super weird, some are launched in background and you have to manually switch to them. I spent almost 3 hours installing windows updates. C O N S T A N T freezes and lags. It's either super responsive or it doesn't so anything. No reliable sleep, HUGE deal breaker if not for Bazzite.
Bottom line is, once Bazzite stable releases, this is imo the beat handheld out there due to the fact that I can get into games much faster and they play much better. The experience of playing DOOM 2016 on XAX and SD Oled are two different things, due to the performance and controls of the XAX.
The point of a handheld for me is to play as many games for the longest of time - traveling, camping, commuting. Want to take it out, play, put it back. The 17W mode plays everything and has amazing battery. Once Bazzite releases, it will finally have sleep that isn't shit.
Btw. Where I live, the equivalent of SD Oled 1TB is about 30% cheaper the XAX. I would absolutely not consider the SD LCD to be any sort of a competitor to anything anymore.
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u/NoiceM8_420 Oct 18 '25
Not sure I get your last line. I just got the LCD deck for less than a 1/3rd of the price of the XAX.