The ROG Xbox Ally X20’s Extra $300 Buys a Display and a Card Slot

Asus prices the OLED Ally X20 above the Ally X without changing the chip, DXVK-Sarek adds a shader-compilation choice for pre-Vulkan-1.4 hardware, and Apex Legends needs a launch flag on the RX 9070 XT.

Saya4 minute readGaming

Asus's ROG Xbox Ally line now spans three price tiers, $599, $999, and $1,299, and the top two run the same processor. The newest of them, the X20, has opened for preorder with an October 15 availability date. The extra $300 is worth reading closely, because none of it goes to performance.

What the X20 changes and what it leaves alone

The ROG Xbox Ally X20 is $1,299.99 standalone and arrives October 15 through Best Buy and the Asus Store, with a $2,499.99 bundle built around ROG Xreal R1 Edition 20 AR glasses, per Tom's Hardware on the preorder and Windows Central's spec rundown. The processor is the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, the same part that sits in the $999.99 Ally X, and the 24GB of LPDDR5X-8000, the 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD, the 80Wh battery, USB4, and Wi-Fi 6E all carry over unchanged.

What changes is the surface a player actually touches. The 7-inch panel becomes a 7.4-inch OLED rated at 600 nits SDR and up to 1,400 nits peak HDR with Dolby Vision. The D-pad gets hybrid metal dome switches and a rotating mechanism Asus calls a Transforming D-pad, aimed at fighting-game diagonals, and the thumbsticks move to TMR magnetic induction. Surface-mounted USB4 ports allowed the board to be repositioned for airflow, with revised fan and heatsink fins around it. The card slot becomes microSD Express, which Asus rates at close to 1 GB/s.

That is a real mid-generation refresh rather than an anniversary sticker, and it is still not a faster handheld. Better airflow can hold clocks up longer in a long session, which is a different claim from more peak performance and one to wait for measured review data on rather than assume. A buyer shopping on frame rate should take the $999 Ally X and spend the difference elsewhere; anyone who has spent a hundred hours squinting at an LCD in a sunlit room already knows what the panel is worth.

DXVK-Sarek hands old hardware a shader-compilation choice

DXVK-Sarek 1.13.0 adds a frame pacing and low-latency mode plus a selectable shader compilation method, so dyasync, async, or none can now be picked through dxvk.shaderCompilationMethod in dxvk.conf or the DXVK_SHADER_COMPILATION_METHOD environment variable, as GamingOnLinux reports. The d7vk module also jumped from v1.9 to v2.1 including the D3D9 bridge rework, D3D9 gained colorkeying, and the memory allocator moved to per-type dynamic chunk sizing.

The compilation method is the setting that changes behaviour on a slow machine. dyasync, the default, still compiles a shader synchronously the first time it is seen, then defers every later variant: it substitutes the closest already-compiled pipeline as a placeholder and swaps the correct one in once a background thread finishes. Traditional async instead draws nothing at all until a pipeline is ready and queues work without limit, which feels smoother on a strong CPU precisely because it is hiding the cost rather than removing it, and which can starve a weak one into rendering nothing. Setting none compiles at draw time, and the project suggests using it as the reference point when something looks like a rendering bug rather than a stutter.

Mainline DXVK now expects a Vulkan 1.4 driver, while the legacy 1.10.x line Sarek forked needs only Vulkan 1.1, per DXVK's driver-support notes. On the GeForce side that gap is Kepler-shaped: NVIDIA lists 470.xx as the legacy branch for GTX 600 and 700 cards, and GeForce Vulkan 1.3 support only arrived in the 510.47.03 release, so a Kepler card cannot reach the modern requirement at all. The project warns that both dyasync and async can produce brief visual inaccuracies and that manipulating shader compilation this way could in principle be picked up by client-side anti-cheat, which makes multiplayer a judgement call.

Apex Legends fatal-errors on the RX 9070 XT

Apex Legends crashes at launch for Radeon RX 9070 XT owners, with the engine reporting a device failure caused by badly formed commands. The game's Japanese community account on X has said the crash is confirmed and under investigation, in a post read via machine translation, and the driver rollback it suggested did not work for everyone who replied. PC Gamer reproduced the crash on an RX 9070 XT and found a temporary workaround in the Steam launch options:

+staticprop_color_use_bindless 0 +staticprop_depth_use_bindless 0 +r_drawworld_depth_bindless 0

Those flags switch off bindless resource access in the static-prop and world-depth passes, so the game is trading some rendering efficiency for the ability to boot. No root cause has been published by AMD or Respawn, which keeps this a workaround rather than a fix and one to undo once a proper patch ships.

A switch that disables one rendering path is a diagnostic before it is a fix. Sarek's none setting exists to separate a compilation artifact from a genuine rendering bug, and the Apex flags do the same job for a crash: if switching the path off stops it, that is the path worth naming in the bug report. The handheld needs no diagnostics at all. The extra $300 buys a display, a D-pad, and a card slot.

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