Gaming Performance

3DMark

Cyberpunk 2077

Steam Deck preset, no upscaling.

Hogwarts Legacy

Low preset, TAA.

Control

Medium preset, no AA, DX11.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

High preset, TAA, DX12.

Space Marine 2

Low preset, TAA.





When pitted against Steam Deck LCD and ASUS ROG Ally in gaming benchmarks, the Zone thrashes both. Despite sharing the iGPU with the ROG Ally and packing a very similar CPU, it can deliver up to 20% faster performance, especially at lower power (15 W and lower). Faster memory (7500 MT/s in the Zone compared to 6400 MT/s memory found in the ROG Ally) is partly responsible for higher numbers, but it cannot solely be responsible for the wide gap between the Zone and the Ally. And remember, the Ally X includes the same 7500 MT/s memory and only manages to beat the OG Ally by a couple of frames on average.

These are excellent results that grant the Zotac Zone the right to brag about being one of the fastest handhelds around with the Radeon 780M integrated graphics. Zotac's engineers have managed to squeeze every ounce of gaming power out of the 780M, resulting in phenomenal gaming performance and allowing the Zone at 15 W to match ROG Ally's performance at 18 W.

This is why seeing that the Zone packs only 16 GB of memory hurts extra hard. For example, the console has the oomph to run Forza Horizon 5 at 900p with "Environment Geometry Quality" set to Ultra, which enables proper, 3D ground cover and much improved LOD models. But since setting said option to Ultra requires setting textures to Ultra as well, the device doesn't have enough memory to prevent stutters from happening even though it can run the game at playable frame rates.

Returnal, another game heavy on memory, has issues with 16 GB of shared memory, as well as many other newer AAA titles that could work with higher texture settings but can't due to the limited amount of memory. While 16 GB is serviceable, 24 GB of RAM would've been miles better. Especially at the tail end of 2024 when many games ask for more than 16 GB of memory in total (system and video memory) to run without issues.