ROG Xbox Ally best settings: How to get the best performance

The ROG Xbox Ally is here, officially bringing Xbox into the handheld gaming market for the first time.

And as the less powerful of the two consoles, the Ally needs some help to squeeze the very best performance out of it.

But we're here to help! We'll take you through a series of steps you can easily perform to get the best possible performance out of your ROG Xbox Ally.

ROG Xbox Ally best settings: How to get the best performance

So you aren't forced to just read a wall of text, we've split this guide up into several different sections, starting with…

Update everything

When you first get your Ally, you will need to perform a bunch of updates to get it running on the latest software.

Open up Armoury Crate, and head to the 'Update Center' menu. From here, you can handily update various drivers.

Next, head to the MyASUS app, open the 'Customer Support' menu and download all of the driver updates you need.

These updates will ensure your CPU and GPU are running on the latest software, giving you months, if not years of performance updates.

Optimise settings

Now, you want to optimise some of your settings like resolution, VRAM and more – thankfully, Armoury Crate makes this incredibly simple to do.

In Armoury Crate, open the 'Performance' menu. In 'Operating Mode', you can turn on 'Turbo' to give yourself the most power, though this drains your battery much faster, so it's best to use while plugged in.

Now, head to 'GPU Settings', and use the following settings:

• Memory Assigned to GPU: Auto
• Radeon Super Resolution (RSR): On
• AMD Fluid Motion Frames: On
• Radeon Anti-Lag: Off
• Radeon Boost: On
• Radeon Chill: Off
• Radeon Image Sharpening: Off

Next, open up 'Eco Assist' and turn on 'CPU Boost'.

Lastly, it's worth keeping some free space on your SSD to make sure everything loads quickly. For that reason, don't completely fill your SSD with new titles, and consider uninstalling some Windows bloat that you aren't going to use, like Office or Copilot.

In-game settings

Now you've set up your Ally for performance, it's just a matter of sorting out your in-game settings.

Naturally, this won't matter much if you're just playing indie games – they'll run great on the highest settings.

But if you're running anything more demanding, you'll run into some problems. We obviously can't give you the best settings for every single game, so here are a few best practices you can use to generally improve your performance.

Change your resolution to 720p to give yourself higher frames in exchange for lower quality.

We would recommend running most games on the lowest possible settings, and then potentially tweaking a few things like textures up to medium if you can handle it.

Make sure you've got V-Sync turned off, as well as Antialiasing and Dynamic Resolution Scaling, too.

We also recommend capping your frame rates to whatever FPS you can hit. If you're hitting averaging around 40fps, it's worth capping your game to 40, as this can help you avoid massive frame rate drops while playing.

Lastly, consider trying out some mods. The Ally is a PC, which means you can use websites like Nexus Mods to download optimisation mods that can help you gain a huge boost to FPS in certain games – worth keeping in mind!

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