Asus and Microsoft will be launching their ROG Xbox Ally series of handheld gaming PCs starting October 16, according to an Asus announcement that went out today.

Like the ROG Ally, the Steam Deck was conceived as an on-the-go alternative to a powerful gaming PC. With its portable, Microsoft is targeting “people that already own Xboxes and potentially a PC”, said Christopher Dring, founder of the specialist website The Game Business.

The engineers on Microsoft's DirectX team are always busy bees, constantly working on one improvement or another. Today, the team announced that it's taking initial steps to get rid of a perennial annoyance in PC gaming: shader compilation waiting times and stuttering.

Regular folk can now play on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, even if they still can't preorder it yet.

At Gamescom 2025 in Cologne, Germany, Microsoft announced a series of gaming-focused enhancements coming to the Windows ecosystem. Alongside new hardware in the Asus ROG Xbox

Microsoft announced Wednesday during Gamescom 2025 that not only will its Xbox Ally handhelds be released on October 16, but the company is spinning up a new initiative to support optimized gaming on these devices called the Handheld Compatibility Program.

Microsoft first announced its plans to introduce a new Windows AI key at the start of 2024, but while we've seen laptops with the new key, this is the first separate keyboard we've seen with it.