Asus refreshed its ROG line of gaming laptops with Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs in India this month ahead of Computex 2025. While the focus remains on gaming, the company’s high-end ROG Strix, Zephyrus and Flow range of laptops are also pushing AI performance on the back of Intel Core Ultra 9 and AMD Ryzen processors. Just like its previous launches, the Taiwanese manufacturer has put emphasis on being first to market with the newest hardware innovations.
At Computex Taipei 2024, Asus was among the first to debut its line of AI-powered Copilot+ laptops running on Snapdragon X Elite chipsets. A year later, as AI PCs become more ubiquitous across segments and price points come down, the company has seen the demand for AI-ready laptops go up in India. The response has been encouraging for the company’s new ROG lineup of laptops, as well, with over 100 pre-orders registered in the first two weeks of May — the highest the company has seen in the past two to three years.
New GeForce RTX 50 Series ROG Laptops
“I think it’s a positive signal to Asus and to the gaming industry that end users are really eagerly waiting for the new graphics card and new chassis coming to the market,” Arnold Su, vice president of the company’s consumer and gaming PC business in India, told Gadgets 360 after the company refreshed its ROG lineup in the country earlier this month. Su spoke about the company’s latest launches, its strategy with gaming and AI in India, the response to ROG Ally handheld in the market and more in a wide-ranging chat.
The graphics card market has seen a continuous growth in India, the Asus executive said, despite a slight dip in the overall consumer notebook shipments in 2023 and 2024. Su attributes this positive trajectory of “so-called gaming machines” to their versatility. It’s not just gamers who are buying gaming laptops. “Maybe 20-30 percent of people are using it for content creation or graphics card designing,” he said.
With the new GeForce RTX 50 series ROG laptops, Asus first launched the higher-end models with GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5070Ti on May 2 and saw over 100 pre-bookings with the average price per unit around Rs. 2.5 lakh. Last week, the company introduced ROG Strix, ROG Zephyrus and TUF gaming laptops with the entry level GeForce RTX 5060 laptop GPUs, which will be priced under Rs. 2 lakh. “We don’t want to wait for the entire 50 series to come and then we launch,” Su said. “We think since the premium model is already ready in India, so we don’t want our premium customers to wait.”
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) is priced at Rs. 2,79,999
AI PCs
With its ROG range, Asus is the market leader in the gaming PC segment in India, but the company has set ambitious targets in the AI PC segment, as well. With rising demand for AI-ready PCs, Asus has tried to differentiate its offerings across three segments of “everyday AI”, “next-level AI”, and “advanced AI” PCs. “For everyday AI, the standard, the benchmark is 10 TOPs (trillions of operations per second — a metric to measure AI performance),” Su said. “And then for 45 tops, we call it the next level AI, which is equivalent to Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs.”
Finally, Asus’ high-end advanced AI PCs come with dedicated Nvidia graphics — the ProArt, ROG, and TUF series of laptops — that can deliver up to 321 TOPs. While the demand for AI PCs is gradually rising and the price point is coming down — Asus launched the Vivobook 16 Copilot+ PC with Snapdragon X series shipset in February at Rs. 65,990 in India — the segment isn’t drawing everyday users.
According to Su, people will begin to use AI applications on their PCs with Microsoft adding AI capabilities to its suite of apps, but they are not utilising the full strength of AI NPUs at this moment.
“If you talk about a working profession or content creator — maybe for example, if I am a graphic designer using Adobe, which already uses AI to enhance their software. So maybe if I buy a next generation AI PC it might be meaningful to me,” Su said. “But today, if you ask me, will I recommend a student to spend more money to buy a Copilot+ PC? To be honest, I may not suggest. I may say, you just buy an everyday AI PC. That is sufficient for you.”
Asus has a 40 percent market share in the AI PC segment in India. According to Su, AI PCs formed less than five percent of the company’s consumer notebook shipments in 2024. Asus aims to increase the share of AI PC shipments in the country to 10 to 15 percent by the end of 2025.
The ROG Ally X handheld launched in India last year
What’s Next for Asus Rog Ally
Beyond gaming PCs, Asus has also found some success with its ROG Ally handheld in India, despite it being a niche piece of hardware. The original Ally launched in the country in 2023 and Asus followed it up with the ROG Ally X last year. According to Su, the handheld has maintained consistent sales in India over the past year.
“I can give you some data points. Now, on average every month, we are selling around 400 to 500 units of ROG Ally in India. It’s quite consistent in the past almost one year,” he said. The number includes both the ROG Ally and the upgraded ROG Ally X, but the latter’s share is small — around five to 10 percent of the total, owing to its higher price point.
“If you see in the segment, we are selling just 400, 500 units in a month, so maybe 6,000, 7,000 units in a year. Although I cannot say it’s bad, it’s not already become a big industry,” Su said.
Su did not speak about the company’s India plans for the next generation of the ROG Ally but said that Asus would stick with the device in the market.
“But we will definitely continue this segment (in India), because we see that there are customers for 400, 500 units every month, at least we should continue to see how we can identify a new area where people want to buy it,” he said.
Asus is reportedly working on the next-generation Ally alongside a second handheld said to be a collaboration with Xbox — “Project Kennan”. Earlier this month, the puported Ally 2 and the Xbox-branded handheld surfaced online via a leaked FCC listing. Su, however, stopped short of sharing any details on what people can expect from the company’s next generation of handhelds. When Asus has news on the devices, he said, people will know. “Same as all the customers, I’m also waiting.”
