‘Inconceivable even three years ago': hands-on with Xbox's flashy new handheld console
The Xbox Ally springs from the coupling of four different tech firms: Windows, Xbox, AMD and Asus, and it's definitely their golden child. Both the Xbox Ally and Ally X models have 7-inch 1080p touchscreens, with 16GB of RAM in the Ally and 24GB of RAM in the Ally X, and 512GB SSD storage and 1TB, respectively. Each has Ryzen Z2 chips, though Xbox Ally X has the AI Z2 chip, which integrates an AI processor directly into the silicon. As for what that actually means for players, Microsoft's head of gaming devices, Roanne Sones, said during a presentation that players will be able to 'take advantage of AI experiences without having to compromise anything on the GPU'. The devices both run Windows, but the team has modified it for optimal gaming.
'We're not loading up the Windows desktop,' Xbox Experiences VP Jason Beaumont said. 'We're not loading up the icons and the task bar and components that really aren't about playing video games … we can save a bunch of resources and then give those to the game, so that they can perform better.'
You can access your collection of games with a library button on the device (there's also a new Xbox button that functions similarly to the one on a console controller). This library includes your PC games from Xbox and other stores, and will let you stream games from your existing Xbox console, if you own one. If you have an Xbox Game Pass subscription, hundreds of games are available to play on the Allies straight away.
During Microsoft's presentation in LA, I'm handed an Xbox Ally X over my right shoulder. I have rather small hands, and this thing is big (and heavier than the Switch 2), but it doesn't feel overwhelming. As a gamer who prefers the ergonomics of an Xbox controller to a PlayStation DualSense, I appreciate the asymmetrical joysticks and how the outer curvature mimics the Xbox pad.
The Xbox Ally X boots up immediately into a homepage that shows your most recently played Xbox games, styled much like the console homepage. We're told to navigate to Gears of War: Reloaded, a remaster of the 2006 classic that's launching on 26 August. As a huge Gears fan, the effect of loading a beautifully remastered version of a game I haven't played in nearly 20 years on a console held between my palms is pretty wild.
Muscle memory immediately kicks in: press A to magnet Marcus to a chest-high wall, reload your gun faster by timing a press of the R1 button – except I'm holding this game that shaped my teen years in my lap. I don't get more than 10 minutes with Gears of War: Reloaded before the Xbox Ally X is somewhat unceremoniously plucked from my hands, and we're shown a quick summary video with talking heads from Microsoft, Windows, ASUS and AMD. One of them says that the power and capabilities of the Xbox Ally X were 'inconceivable even three years ago'.
There's no price point yet, perhaps because the uncertainty of President Trump's tariffs has Microsoft hesitant to name one at the moment. However, the look, feel, and function of the ROG Xbox Ally will make it a great option for those looking to access both Xbox and third-party games on a portable console, while the Xbox Ally X seems tailor-made for performance perfectionists.
Sign up to Pushing Buttons
Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming
after newsletter promotion
The price will be a huge factor: even the cheaper Ally console is likely to be more expensive than Nintendo's new Switch 2. But as someone who doesn't really play Nintendo games, and who only briefly had a Steam Deck before giving it to a friend, the ROG Xbox Ally is the first handheld I can see myself picking up and regularly playing.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
CEO of AI company gets bloodied pig's head in horror package as he's called a 'Clark Kent knockoff'
The CEO of an AI startup in Las Vegas receives a package containing a severed pig's head and threatening letter - believed to stem from his company's use of artificial intelligence. Blake Owens, founder and CEO of Agrippa, an AI-powered platform to connect commercial real estate investors and developers without traditional brokers, received the bloodied pig's head along with the menacing note on July 29. The gruesome parcel was sent to a relative's home, and the message criticized Owens' use of AI - with personal insults that called him a 'Clark Kent knockoff' and ended ominously with: 'And don't get greedy because pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.' SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO Owens told KLAS: 'Perhaps this person watched too much of The Godfather. 'Needless to say, I still take it very seriously, but don't feel like I'm being truly threatened. It was a message.' The note was signed only with the initial 'M' and appeared to be motivated by a June TV segment that profiled Owens and Agrippa's AI tool, known as 'Marcus', to automate real estate transactions by matching developers with investors and evaluating property bids. The sinister letter also said: 'AI is not going to replace brokers. Clearly you don't understand real estate wasn't built by developers or investors. And it sure as hell wasn't built by tech guys in Lululemon. It was built by brokers. We did it the hard way. No shortcuts, no tech, just people.' Owens said he believed the sender was fearful of being displaced by automation. The businessman said: 'I understand this person is probably just frustrated that business isn't going well for them, and then they see AI replacement stories on top of that. And I just so happen to be someone they can focus their frustration on.' A photo of the package showed the sender was labeled as 'Marcus Agrippa' - a reference to the company's AI system. Owens joked: 'Is this a message that you know your own AI is turning against you? I wasn't quite sure how to interpret it.' Las Vegas PD confirmed it was investigating the incident and classified it as a harassment case. A suspect was yet to be identified. Owens said he did not feel 'genuinely threatened' and would not press charges should the sender be eventually identified. He told KLAS: 'I don't want to punch down on this person; they may be in a tough spot in life. I do see this as an opportunity to show people you don't become a better person by making another man a lesser person.' Owens also addressed potential anxiety surrounding AI's growing presence in the workforce, particularly in fields such as real estate that had historically relied on personal relationships. He said: 'You know, people are scared. They feel displaced and when disruption moves faster than education, fear just fills the gap.' Owens added that Agrippa was not designed to replace humans but it was created to empower professionals through AI. He said: '[Winston Churchill] said to be perfect is to change often. I think a lot of people are afraid of change and what's coming with AI, because it really is a tsunami of change that people are trying to resist. But the more you embrace it, the better you'll do, the more skills that you'll accumulate, more value you'll bring to the table.' Despite the threatening nature of the package, Owens remained committed to encouraging dialogue and told Inman: 'If I knew who this person was, I'd say, "Hey, feel free to reach out to me - maybe not with a package, just send me an email - I'm happy to share whatever education I can on keeping up with AI."' The investigation into the incident remained ongoing.
Daily Mail
36 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Audiences are left shocked by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi's 'aggressively provocative' Wuthering Heights movie with 'BDSM sex scene'
Emerald Fennell's upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation has been called 'aggressively provocative' and will feature a BDSM-inspired sex scene. The upcoming adaptation of Emily Bronte's classic novel sees Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi portray doomed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff. But those expecting a faithful adaptation of the beloved work may be in for a rude awakening as Fennell's upcoming film is said to lean into the 'stylised depravity' she has become known for after directing Saltburn. According to World of Reel, Fennell's Wuthering Heights received a mixed reaction at its first test screening in Dallas, Texas this month. The feature opens with a public hanging that sees the condemned man 'ejaculate mid-execution'. Emerald Fennell's upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation has been called 'aggressively provocative' and will feature a BDSM-inspired sex scene His agony sends the crowd into an 'orgiastic frenzy' and a nun reportedly fondles 'the corpse's visible erection'. The film is also said to feature 'intimate, clinical and purposefully discomforting' masturbation scenes and a BDSM-inspired sex scene involving horse reins. The camera is also said to linger on 'suggestive' imagery including 'egg yolks running through fingers' and 'dough being kneaded with quiet aggression'. The publication does note that Margot and Jacob both deliver 'committed performances' and have 'great chemistry'. Fennell has made a name for herself as the director of Promising Young Woman and the black comedy Saltburn which saw a character drinking another's dirty bathwater. Along with her directing and writing career, she has also acted, noteably playing Queen Camilla in The Crown. Wuthering Heights was published by Emily Brontë in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, one year before her death. It follows the story of an orphan, Heathcliff, who is taken in by the Earnshaw family, and he later grows close to their daughter and his foster sister, Cathy. The first known adaptation was from A. V. Bramble in 1920, with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon's 1939 version being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Born in 1818 in West Yorkshire, Emily was the fifth of six children, and spent most of her short life in the moorland village of Haworth, where her Irish father Patrick was curate. But life dealt Emily a series of terrible blows as she lost her mother when she was three, then two older sisters when she was seven. Following her trauma, the novelist retreated into a fantasy world, writing stories and poetry with her siblings. The writer poured her suffering and passion into Wuthering Heights, a wrenching love story as raw as the Yorkshire Moors on which it's set.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5's energy use. It could be higher than past models
In mid-2023, if a user asked OpenAI's ChatGPT for a recipe for artichoke pasta or instructions on how to make a ritual offering to the ancient Canaanite deity Moloch, its response might have taken – very roughly – 2 watt-hours, or about as much electricity as an incandescent bulb consumes in 2 minutes. OpenAI released a model on Thursday that will underpin the popular chatbot – GPT-5. Ask that version of the AI for an artichoke recipe, and the same amount of pasta-related text could take several times – even 20 times – that amount of energy, experts say. As it rolled out GPT-5, the company highlighted the model's breakthrough capabilities: its ability to create websites, answer PhD-level science questions, and reason through difficult problems. But experts who have spent the past years working to benchmark the energy and resource usage of AI models say those new powers come at a cost: a response from GPT-5 may take a significantly larger amount of energy than a response from previous versions of ChatGPT. OpenAI, like most of its competitors, has released no official information on the power usage of its models since GPT-3, which came out in 2020. Sam Altman, its CEO, tossed out some numbers on ChatGPT's resource consumption on his blog this June. However, these figures, 0.34 watt-hours and 0.000085 gallons of water per query, do not refer to a specific model and have no supporting documentation. 'A more complex model like GPT-5 consumes more power both during training and during inference. It's also targeted at long thinking … I can safely say that it's going to consume a lot more power than GPT-4,' said Rakesh Kumar, a professor at the University of Illinois, currently working on the energy consumption of computation and AI models. The day GPT-5 was released, researchers at the University of Rhode Island's AI lab found that the model can use up to 40 watt-hours of electricity to generate a medium-length response of about 1,000 tokens, which are the building blocks of text for an AI model and are approximately equivalent to words. A dashboard they put up on Friday indicates GPT-5's average energy consumption for a medium-length response is just over 18 watt-hours, a figure that is higher than all other models they benchmark except for OpenAI's o3 reasoning model, released in April, and R1, made by the Chinese AI firm Deepseek. This is 'significantly more energy than GPT-4o', the previous model from OpenAI, said Nidhal Jegham, a researcher in the group. Eighteen watt-hours would correspond to burning that incandescent bulb for 18 minutes. Given recent reports that ChatGPT handles 2.5bn requests a day, the total consumption of GPT-5 could reach the daily electricity demand of 1.5m US homes. As large as these numbers are, researchers in the field say they align with their broad expectations for GPT-5's energy consumption, given that GPT-5 is believed to be several times larger than OpenAI's previous models. OpenAI has not released the parameter counts – which determine a model's size – for any of its models since GPT-3, which had 175bn parameters. A disclosure this summer from the French AI company Mistral finds a 'strong correlation' between a model's size and its energy consumption, based on Mistral's study of its in-house systems. 'Based on the model size, the amount of resources [used by GPT-5] should be orders of magnitude higher than that for GPT-3,' said Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside who studies the resource footprint of AI. GPT-4 was widely believed to be 10 times the size of GPT-3. Jegham, Kumar, Ren and others say that GPT-5 is likely to be significantly larger than GPT-4. Leading AI companies like OpenAI believe that extremely large models may be necessary to achieve AGI, that is, an AI system capable of doing humans' jobs. Altman has argued strongly for this view, writing in February: 'It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains,' though he said GPT-5 did not surpass human intelligence. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion In its benchmarking study in July, which looked at the power consumption, water usage and carbon emissions for Mistral's Le Chat bot, the startup found a one-to-one relationship between a model's size and its resource consumption, writing: 'A model 10 times bigger will generate impacts one order of magnitude larger than a smaller model for the same amount of generated tokens.' Jegham, Kumar and Ren said that while GPT-5's scale is significant, there are probably other factors that will come into play in determining its resource consumption. GPT-5 is deployed on more efficient hardware than some previous models. GPT-5 appears to use a 'mixture-of-experts' architecture, which means that it is streamlined so that not all of its parameters are activated when responding to a query, a construction which will likely cut its energy consumption. On the other hand, GPT-5 is also a reasoning model, and works in video and images as well as text, which likely makes its energy footprint far greater than text-only operations, both Ren and Kumar say – especially as the reasoning mode means that the model will compute for a longer time before responding to a query. 'If you use the reasoning mode, the amount of resources you spend for getting the same answer will likely be several times higher, five to 10,' said Ren. In order to calculate an AI model's resource consumption, the group at the University of Rhode Island multiplied the average time that model takes to respond to a query – be it for a pasta recipe or an offering to Moloch – by the model's average power draw during its operation. Estimating a model's power draw was 'a lot of work', said Abdeltawab Hendawi, a professor of data science at the University of Rhode Island. The group struggled to find information on how different models are deployed within data centers. Their final paper contains estimates for which chips are used for a given model, and how different queries are parceled out between different chips in a datacenter. Altman's June blog post confirmed their findings. The figure he gave for ChatGPT's energy consumption per query, 0.34 watt-hours per query, closely matches what the group found for GPT-4o. Hendawi, Jegham and others in their group said that their findings underscored the need for more transparency from AI companies as they release ever-larger models. 'It's more critical than ever to address AI's true environmental cost,' said Marwan Abdelatti, a professor at URI. 'We call on OpenAI and other developers to use this moment to commit to full transparency by publicly disclosing GPT-5's environmental impact.'
