Steam Deck could be essentially the most mainstream example of the hand-held gaming PC, but Valve is actually not the primary company to offer the concept a shot. Other manufacturers got there first and proceed to innovate with intriguing products. The AyaNeo Air is essentially the most exciting of those handhelds yet, in that it’s something of an anti-Deck. The Air is small and simple to handle in the best way that Steam Deck will not be. It has the OLED panel with the inky blacks and incredible contrast that the Deck’s mediocre IPS LCD doesn’t. Also – for good or bad – it runs on Windows 11, meaning that it plays every thing, something that is still beyond the Deck when running the default Steam OS.

First impressions are compelling, exactly due to its miniature form factor, like a sort of hybrid between Switch, Switch Lite and PlayStation Vita. Nevertheless it’s at this point we must always indicate that there are literally two versions of the AyaNeo air – a normal model with a 28Wh battery and a thicker, heavier Pro model with a 38Wh variant. Battery life, as we will discover, is an actual problem on the usual machine.

What each have in common are the identical basic aesthetics, the identical excellent analogue sticks and face buttons, the identical lovely display and the identical SD card reader. I discovered the shoulder triggers slightly ‘spongy’ for my tastes while the shoulder buttons feel slightly insubstantial but there are some real nice ideas here, similar to USB-Cs top and bottom, each able to charging.

When it comes to specs, the AyaNeo Air has a bewildering array of options, so let’s boil it right down to the bare minimum. There’s an ‘entry level’ version with 8GB of DDR4X-3200 memory and a 128GB SSD, which I believe you need to discount right away. AMD APUs, just like the Ryzen 5 5560U common to all variants of the usual Air thrive on memory bandwidth, so I’d recommend the dearer 16GB DDR4X-4200. The processor itself is effectively a cut-down version of the Ryzen 7 5825U, available on the upper echelons of the AyaNeo Air Pro spec list. The total chip has eight CPU cores and 16 threads, reduced to 6 cores and 12 threads on the Ryzen 5. Eight Vega GPU compute units on the top-end Ryzen 7 drop right down to six on the Ryzen 5. The one other spec variant to pay attention to between Air and Air Pro is the battery – get the Pro with the larger battery. It’s bulkier, but to not any degree that actively interferes with gaming.

Establishing the unit with my test games, I’m reminded of the problems I encountered running Windows on Steam Deck. The OS isn’t set-up for handheld gaming in the best way that SteamOS is, meaning there’s far less hand-holding in the overall UI. A USB-C hub is actually essential in getting quickly set-up, using a keyboard and mouse. Nevertheless, there may be a bespoke AyaSpace app which acts as an uber-launcher of sorts – collating all your installed games, while also allowing users to tweak controller settings and functionality… and to regulate the quantity of power consumed by the Ryzen processor.

That latter point is crucial in managing battery life. Out of the box, three power levels are supported: 5W for battery conservation, an 8W ‘balanced’ mode and a 12W gaming mode, meant for contemporary titles. There’s also a user-configurable Pro mode, where you select the ability limit as much as 15W on the usual Air and 18W on the Air Pro. The upper the ability limit, the less battery life you will have, but in addition the harder the cooling assembly must work. And the machine can get quite warm, if not hot to the touch at higher wattages. In my tests, 5W is a write-off for gaming, 8W is advantageous for very low-end titles or 2D games (Cuphead works beautifully, for example) while 12W is the place to be for one of the best ratio between power and performance. That said, 15W often provides the additional juice required to show sub-30fps gameplay right into a more palatable experience. This, again, points out the utility of the Pro model with the larger battery, even in the event you go for one without the improved Ryzen 7 processor – the very fact is that the larger battery makes accessing those higher power limits more comfortable when it comes to battery life.

So let’s dig deeper into performance. We shouldn’t expect Steam Deck-like performance from a much older GPU architecture, however the existence of the Deck cannot be factored out of any performance comparisons: I’ve included benchmarks here of the identical titles running under Windows, albeit Win10 – Steam Deck still lacks the BIOS support required for the newest rendition of the OS. Using each the usual and Pro models (many because of our friends at Time Extension for lending us their Pro!) now we have measurements at 8W, 12W and 15W to get an idea of the scaling on each available processors, while the Deck metrics at 15W reveal how much of a game-changer RDNA 2 is within the mobile graphics space.

Kicking off with Forza Horizon 5, this was actually the triple-A game that gave me one of the best experience on either of the AyaNeo Air units. Using the inner 30fps cap, I could run at 12W for a virtually locked performance level across a lot of the game content, barring heavy storm weather. This was using 720p resolution, medium settings and TAA quite than MSAA, which caused speckling artefacts. The benchmark sequence is taken from a taxing area of gameplay and is representative of the particular game experience, unlike many other benchmarks.

There are a few takeaways here. Firstly, scaling from Ryzen 5 5560U to Ryzen 7 5825U will not be exactly compelling – seven percent at 12W and just three percent at 15W. Power is clearly more necessary than silicon, until you think about the relatively stellar performance of RDNA 2. Also curious is that at 8W, the Ryzen 7 appears to be power-starved and performs worse than the Ryzen 5 – which I double-checked and located to be the case across all tested games.

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The Marvel’s Spider-Man cutscene-into-gameplay sequence taken from the start of the sport is not representative of the particular way the sport plays but quite puts graphics hardware to the test in a wholly like-for-like scenario played out across all test units. Here, we discover the identical sort of scaling: Ryzen 5 outperforms Ryzen 7 at 8W (which, to be fair, is hardly useable for triple-A titles anyway), while once more, the Ryzen 7 offers greater performance boosts vs its cut-down equivalent at 12W quite than 15W.

Steam Deck’s boost over the AyaNeo Air models is at its lowest here, but we’re still taking a look at a giant improvement overall. When it comes to settings, I decide to play Marvel’s Spider-Man at medium settings, with traffic, crowd density and depth of field set to low – in order that’s how I benched it. Similar to Forza Horizon 5, the sport comes with a 30fps cap option that delivers properly consistent frame-pacing however the difference is that dynamic resolution scaling is crucial in delivering anything near a locked experience (I’d recommend avoiding IGTI and FSR 2.0 options as they each add loads of blur). Even then, there are still problems with stuttering in fast web-swinging across the town.

You’ll be able to, in fact, drop settings even lower but even with the gorgeous OLED screen, I do think there’s a degree you reach where you strip away an excessive amount of. This title also highlights the hard performance limits of the Vega architecture: it is a struggle to play this locked to 30fps, while Steam Deck can do all of it day, with only minimal stutter within the web-swinging sections where AyaNeo Air obviously has issues.

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Death Stranding continues the trend of the Ryzen 5 outperforming the Ryzen 7 at 8W, but the purpose is moot often because the sport runs like a slideshow. What’s intriguing here is that there may be fairly decent scaling, not only between wattages but in addition when comparing Ryzen 7 to Ryzen 5. Notionally there may be an additional 33 percent of GPU compute available with the additional compute units, but as a consequence of the brutal power limit and architectural reasons, you never see the total potential performance. Still, an eight to 10 percent performance uplift here depending on power puts Death Stranding in front.

Nevertheless, what I discovered in gameplay is that there is not any real point reducing settings below the default and it was tough for any AyaNeo Air to keep up 30fps locked, something that Steam Deck has no real issue with. On this scenario, effectively the one way forward is to make use of upscaling or lower internal resolution.

There’s one other issue only hinted at within the bar charts here: yes, the Steam Deck is so much, lot faster but the bottom one percent scores hint at the actual issue facing the Vega-powered AyaNeo Air – stuttering. Mid-way through the bench, Vega graphics faces off-putting stuttering issues that the Steam Deck doesn’t. I’m wondering if that is right down to how graphics memory is portioned off by Windows however it is what it’s – and was repeatable across multiple runs, so it is not a difficulty attributable to shader compilation (which Death Stranding does while loading, by the best way).

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We’ll close out with metrics on Treatment’s Control, which doesn’t have an internal benchmark sequence. This causes some problems for us in that the one like-for-like content that is easily accessible is the start of the sport, which is considerably lighter on the graphics hardware than essentially the most hardcore of motion inside the experience. Still, what you do get are relative performance differentials between all tested scenarios.

At around an eight to 11 percent boost comparing Ryzen 5 to Ryzen 7, there may be meaningful scalability from the higher-end mobile chip within the 12-15W range, while once more the lower-end offering delivers higher frame-rates within the extremely power-constrained 8W range. I’d definitely be taking a look at these results using the ‘percentage differential’ mode quite than the frame-rate mode though, because as stated, frame-rates in effects-heavy combat are lower.

Inside the video at the highest of the page, you will see a good amount of Control played at 720p on low settings using the usual AyaNeo Air with the Ryzen 5 5560U and the 12W power limit. This one could be very difficult for the hardware on quite a few fronts when it comes to actual gameplay: firstly, there isn’t a 30fps cap, meaning a really inconsistent experience from start to complete. Secondly, without the 30fps cap, loads of the stutter comes from 16ms frame-times you do not really need – and also you’re paying for all of those extra generated frames with battery life. And eventually, performance can dip into the mid-20s. Ryzen 7 at 15W can be a greater experience of course, but still subject to the drawbacks of unlocked performance.

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The benchmarks reveal that the Steam Deck’s RDNA 2 graphics core is able to much better performance at the identical power level, but it will be significant to notice that Valve’s decision to go for a quad-core CPU cluster does end in diminished performance in some scenarios, where the AyaNeo operates with an improved CPU architecture and more cores. It won’t affect every game, where the GPU ceiling is prevalent but stats offered up by Forza and Tomb Raider benchmarks show some interesting results. Each benchmarks offer a readout at the tip that highlight the performance level of the CPU in processing game logic and render logic, the sport simulation and the time taken to organize commands for the GPU.

Forza Horizon 5 shows fairly consistent averages in processing game logic, but with more CPU cores available, lowest scores improve significantly – meaning higher results for the AyaNeo Air products. Meanwhile, on the rendering side there’s a transparent pecking order in performance moving from Deck at the bottom to Air in the center to Pro at the highest, though lowest frame-rates are similar between Air and Deck.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is more illuminating – when it comes to game logic, average frame-rates on the Air and Pro are significantly faster than the Deck, and lowest frame-rate is correspondingly lower on Deck too. Taking a look at the sport logic side of things, more of a spot opens up between the three CPU clusters though it’s clear that Steam Deck is considerably slower. As I said, most of those results don’t impact much of the particular game since the GPU is the first limit but actually within the case of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, now we have good data here on why we’re getting stutters on Steam Deck at certain places within the benchmark that we do not get on the Ayaneo handhelds.

While not especially relevant to the games I played, I can absolutely see scenarios where the AyaNeo Air may outperform Steam Deck. For instance, taking a look at game emulators, typically you will find that CPU performance is, on balance, more necessary than graphics. I’d recommend taking a take a look at MVG’s video on AyaNeo emulation for some insight on this.