Battlefield 6 isn’t a horrendous mess on ROG Ally and I refuse to believe it
When I attended the Battlefield 6 preview in Los Angeles, I asked Vince Zampella about performance on handheld PCs. Despite saying it might work on platforms that aren’t the Steam Deck, he told me that it’s “probably not the best way to play the game.” With the Battlefield 6 beta live across PS5, Xbox, and PC, I had to know whether he was right, and I’m sorry, Vince, but it rocks on the Asus ROG Ally.
Battlefield games are demanding titles, and not just in terms of storage space. With visual wizardry and awe-inspiring fidelity that always puts Call of Duty to shame, my expectations for Battlefield 6’s performance on ROG Ally weren’t exactly high. It’s worth noting that a recent graphics driver patch is live for the handheld and fixes a previously reported boot-up issue. With that obstacle out of the way, I couldn’t believe my eyes after sticking everything on medium settings without the aid of frame generation.
With the Ally’s 25W performance mode engaged, Battlefield 6 is a surprisingly stable experience on Asus’s robust portable gaming console. The FPS game’s onboard metric tracker tells me I’m getting well over 30fps, often lingering around the 40-45fps mark. Sure, it isn’t a steady 60, but it’s a respectable number to be at. What’s even cooler is that I have Battlefield 6’s resolution at 1080p by default. Typically, if a game isn’t running too well, I’ll knock it down to 720p at the sacrifice of clarity.
Of course, AMD’s FSR tech can help in that area, restoring some of those nitty gritty details where needed. Yet, without this feature, it still managed to keep up with every skirmish unfolding on the device’s humble seven-inch LCD screen. Destruction doesn’t pose too much of a problem, either. Whether I’m knocking down building faces with the Engineer class’s RPG or C4 as a Recon sniper, BF6’s debris-filled explosions unravel with the same level of cinematic brilliance you’d expect.
It isn’t a perfect experience. Vehicular combat in jets and helicopters can be troublesome to performance as you whisk across maps in one fell swoop. While it isn’t awful, some further tweaks are likely required to accommodate this. But when it comes to your bread and butter, boots on the ground battles, the ROG Ally is capable of keeping it together. What I am curious to see is where Battlefield 6’s Steam Deck performance lands.
Zampella straight up told me that “it does not work on Steam Deck”, but we won’t know until the game arrives on October 10, 2025. Following my Battlefield 6 preview, I’ve already put in over ten hours into the beta in the last couple of days. That number likely pales in comparison to others, and that’s if I can even get into the game in the face of queues with well over 200,000 players.
Blending the high points of BF3 and BF4 with some modern-day improvements, it’s clear that the calls for a straightforward shooter free of silly skins and a focus on grittier combat are loud and clear. If a shooter can pull me away from grinding the strongest game in the genre right now, The Finals, then I reckon it’s worth a go.
If you don’t get the chance to try it this weekend, dive into the best Steam Deck games in the meantime before the beta returns on August 14.
