More portable than Steam Deck with a better screen - so what’s the catch?
Other manufacturers got there first and continue to innovate with intriguing products.
TheAyaNeo Airis the most exciting of those handhelds yet, in that it’s something of an anti-Deck.
The Air is small and easy to handle in the way that Steam Deck is not.
Battery life, as we shall discover, is a real problem on the standard machine.
Eight Vega GPU compute units on the top-end Ryzen 7 drop down to six on the Ryzen 5.
It’s bulkier, but not to any degree that actively interferes with gaming.
A USB-C hub is essentially essential in getting quickly set-up, using a keyboard and mouse.
That latter point is crucial in managing battery life.
And the machine can get rather warm, if not hot to the touch at higher wattages.
That said, 15W often provides the extra juice required to turn sub-30fps gameplay into a more palatable experience.
So let’s dig deeper into performance.
This was using 720p resolution, medium prefs and TAA rather than MSAA, which caused speckling artefacts.
There are a couple of takeaways here.
Power is clearly more important than silicon, until you factor in the relatively stellar performance of RDNA 2. like enable JavaScript to use our comparison tools.
Even then, there are still problems with stuttering in fast web-swinging across the city.
Still, an eight to 10 percent performance uplift here depending on power puts Death Stranding in front.
In this scenario, effectively the only way forward is to use upscaling or lower internal resolution.
Mid-way through the bench, Vega graphics faces off-putting stuttering issues that the Steam Deck does not.
We’ll close out with metrics on Remedy’s Control, which does not have an internal benchmark sequence.
Still, what you do get are relative performance differentials between all tested scenarios.
And finally, performance can dip into the mid-20s.
I’d recommend taking a look atMVG’s video on AyaNeo emulationfor some insight on this.
Since full HD gaming is essentially off the table, I would have preferred a native resolution 720p panel.
That being the case, I’d recommend headphones for a good audio experience.
