ROG Xbox Ally X runs DOOM: The Dark Ages at 1080p 70 FPS with ray-tracing

The ROG Xbox Ally X is coming in October, with this collaboration between ASUS and Microsoft serving as the first taste of the company's next-gen plans for Xbox hardware. It's a Windows 11 gaming PC; however, with an optimized version of the OS, the first Xbox-branded PC gaming handheld is set to present a more intuitive Steam Deck-like experience than we've seen to date.

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Powered by the new AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme Processor with integrated Radeon Graphics and an XDNA NPU that offers up to 50 TOPS of performance, the flagship ROG Xbox Ally X also sports a vibrant 120 Hz 1080p display and 24GB of LPDDR5X memory. Impressive stuff, and with a price tag of around $900 (the non-X model is set to be cheaper), you might be wondering what sort of performance it delivers, natively, when playing a modern AAA title.

Well, according to @carygolomb on X, who went hands-on with the ROG Ally X at Gamescom 2025, playing DOOM: The Dark Ages, the premium PC gaming handheld hit an impressive 70 FPS at 1080p with ray-tracing enabled. And that's with the unit drawing 28W of total system power. However, this jaw-dropping performance for a PC gaming handheld comes with a long list of caveats.

Firstly, ray-tracing is enabled because DOOM: The Dark Ages is an RT-only experience that leverages the advanced lighting effect technology for global illumination and hit-detection on all versions of the game. On the ROG Ally X, the game was being run with a mixture of low and medium settings with FSR (AMD's upscaling solution) enabled using the Performance preset. This means that the internal resolution was 540p, with FSR upscaling this to 1080p. And on top of this, AMD's FSR Frame Generation was also enabled, so the native frame rate was closer to 35 FPS than the 70 FPS we see in the video.

FSR at a 50% render resolution setting and Frame Generation turned on might set off alarm bells; however, these are the sorts of technologies tailor-made for handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally X. Upscaling and frame generation open the door to efficiency and a longer-lasting battery, however, as this is FSR 3 and not FSR 4, image fidelity and latency suffer. The good news is that Microsoft has confirmed that it's going to use the NPU inside the ROG Xbox Ally X for its own Super Resolution upscaling and other rendering technologies that could include AI-powered Frame Generation. Two technologies that could dramatically improve image quality and motion clarity when gaming on the handheld.