The Xbox Ally Handhelds Are Getting an Upscaled Lease on Life

Until Xbox shares more details on its own homegrown handheld, the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X and its prettier, costlier sibling, the Xbox Ally X20, are the best bang for buck we got for playing PC games on the go. Thankfully, there’s a new AMD upscaling update that makes these handhelds so much better, and it may be enough to help you bide your time until the Xbox makes its own. Let’s say you dropped a grand or more on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X at launch last year, and you’re starting to find some of the latest big-name launches still struggle to manage a playable experience. AMD’s new update to these handhelds bring the more recent FSR 4.1 upscaling model to these recent gaming devices. That model has been exclusive to its recent Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs, with AMD claiming it wasn’t designed for the older RDNA 3.5 GPU microarchitecture installed in the handheld’s Ryzen Z2 Extreme chips. The fact that AMD has changed its tune is significant for players. Improved upscaling matters more on handhelds—with their limited power draw—than on any expensive desktop tower. It’s not just about games running better; it’s a means to make games look better—like you’re not getting a worse experience just for hopping away from your PC. To receive the update, all you have to do is load up the Armoury Crate SE app built into the handheld’s quick settings menu (if it’s been a while, just try hitting the Xbox button and it will appear as one of the first options). Then you can flick over to Update Center and look under Preview Updates. Download the AMD Radeon Graphics Driver version 32.0.32015.7029, and that should be all. Now, if you look under the quick access Command Center menu, you can scroll down and hit the little pen-and-paper options menu. From there, you’ll want to add the AMD FSR Upscaling icon into your toolbar. Left, ‘Ominusha: Way of the Sword’ with an older version of FSR; right, the game with FSR 4.1. Enabling that setting tunes the handheld to use FSR 4.1 in all your applicable games. AMD shares a list of titles that currently support FSR Redstone. Just a word of warning, you may find that not all your current backlog supports the latest AMD upscaler. At the same time, many of the best and hottest AAA games of the last few months do. That includes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, but it’s also incorporated into less established titles like The Blood of Dawnwalker and Star Wars: Galactic Racer. This can mean better average performance. If I play Cyberpunk 2077 on the default Steam Deck graphics settings with the FSR 4 upgrade, I can get the same frame rate—around 44 fps—when upscaling from 720p on “Quality” mode as I can without the upgrade jumping from 540p to 1080p on the default “Balanced” mode. Left, ‘007 First Light’ running older FSR; right, the game running the latest version of FSR 4.1 on an Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. What performance or visual gains you’ll get will depend heavily on the title. Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a relatively well-optimized game, but on an ROG Xbox Ally X you’ll still not manage to get to 60 fps running the game on a medium graphics preset, whether or not you’re running the new version of FSR. However, the game simply looks leagues better without the frizziness surrounding characters’ hair or noisy environmental textures. It looks much closer to how the game should look when running natively. The difference can be subtle at times, but you can immediately spot the difference playing these games in motion. In 007: First Light, playing without FSR 4.1 enabled makes far-off details less defined, on top of all the close-up details I mentioned. Many of these games already supported an earlier version of AMD’s frame generation technology, but it was a poor shadow of what we’ve seen recently from both Intel and Nvidia on mobile platforms. The FSR 4.1 update enables you to get a refined version of that same tech. It’s not actually the best version of itself right now. AMD’s frame generation tech has had some telling frame pacing issues that lead to an even greater feeling of latency than normal. AMD’s head of computing and graphics, Jack Hyunh has said the company is working to fix those issues. The bigger problem for other handheld owners is that the update isn’t currently applicable to other handhelds running the same Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip. You need to manually download and force the driver updates on a device like the Lenovo Legion Go 2. I have not tested this, so I can’t say whether the drivers introduce any other issues. In any case, it’s not like you’re not going to see anywhere close to the 30% to 40% gains of buying a $1,800 handheld like the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. It may just be enough to make you feel a little better about spending $1,000 or $1,300 just to play your games outside the home.