Mobile gaming, unlike what one might think, represents a leading sector in the gaming industry. And the success of Nintendo Switch has arrived to prove it to us, which goes alongside all gaming on smartphones. In recent months, several fierce opponents have taken to the field. Among these there is AyaNeo Air, portable console that comes from China and which has been tested by Digital Foundry.
But let’s start from the beginning, AyaNeo Air is a real portable console that will fit into the same market segment as Steam Deck. While it differs from the Logitech G Cloud which bets everything on services like Xbox xCloud and GeForce Now (you can read more in this article).
The format of AyaNeo Air is decidedly more compact than Steam Deck, with very small dimensions and similar to those of Nintendo Switch Lite. Obviously the manufacturer had to sacrifice hardware performance a bit to keep this format, but certainly hasn’t spared other technical specifications.
The portable console is available in two versions, “Standard” And “Pro“with different technical specifications regarding CPU, GPU, memory and battery.
The Standard model is equipped with the AMD Ryzen 5 5560U CPU built with Zen 3 architecture and equipped with 6 cores. The GPU is made up of 6 Radeon Vega 6 Compute Units. It mounts 8GB or 16GB of RAM memory and 128GB up to 512GB of SSD storage space on board. The battery will be 3,750mAh.
The Pro model is equipped with the AMD Ryzen 7 5825U CPU built with Zen 3 architecture and equipped with 6 cores. The GPU is made up of 8 Radeon Vega 6 Compute Units. It is equipped with 16GB or 32GB of RAM memory and from 512GB up to 2TB of SSD storage space. The battery will be 10,050mAh. Digital Foundry strongly recommends using this modelboth for the greater RAM memory available (8GB are often too few), and for the autonomy greater than 36%.
Both will feature a 5.5 “OLED display with 1080p resolution, therefore with a better resolution than that adopted by Nintendo Switch. On the other hand, with regard to consumption, the possibility of establishing a maximum ceiling is very important. Especially useful for those titles that require less hardware resources and which consequently allow you to play many more hours.
The performance, due to the decidedly small format, is not up to the Steam Deck. But using Zen 3 architecture for the CPU and Vega 6 for the GPU allow you to narrow the gap to less than you might think. In fact, the results of the benchmarks made by Digital Foundry are quite surprising.
AyaNeo Air Pro is capable of running games like Control, Death Stranding, and Marvel’s Spider-Man at 720p @ 30fps, just to give a few examples. But it is no less with Forza Horizon 5 and Shadows of the Tomb Raider either. Furthermore the use of the Zen 3 and Vega 6 architecture makes sure that the handheld console does not suffer from stutteringas happens in some cases on Steam Deck.
Another plus is the double USB Type-C port to recharge the portable console. This makes it more comfortable to play while the device is charging.
Digital Foundry also mentions some negatives. First of all, as we have said does not recommend the 8GB RAM model, and more generally the Standard model because of too little autonomy. Integrated speakers and haptic feedback are not of great quality, better to use headphones and disable the vibration.
Source: Digital Foundry