eccentricbeing
Published
30fps may not be acceptable for some but steam deck wasn't meant to play high fidelity at 60fps with newer games. With that said, you could scale down the resolution to 70% and play it with high settings and 40/40. But if you care about fidelity, you can get locked 30fps 100% scale. Fun game. I miss the French accents in the sequel.
If it weren't for the fact that this game works better with proton ge, then it would've been platinum.
Not trouble, just a launch window that you have to press play and adjust graphic settings.
Put it simply, play this in max settings minus the phys-x and in 60fps and call it a day. Runs beautifully.
If you want a 60fps game, you can get it. If you want great fidelity (but at 30fps), you can get it. But I want the best of both worlds....40fp with the best fidelity I can squeeze. I played through almost half of the game to discover it.
The game has a feature where you can lowering the rendering resolution but it only limits you with one choice. With 800p, the lowered choice makes the image quality look poor...similarly to an FSR ultra performance quality. In 720p, the lowered choice looks more like a balanced option.
But I wanted a little more fidelity while maintaining stable 40fps. I went to the rendering ini file in the game's local files and changed the rendering resolution to 1024x576. And I feel like I cracked the code. Great fidelity and smooth gameplay. You can kinda do it with 800p if you go with 960x600, but it's not 100% stable though some may consider it good enough. At 1024x576, it's not 100% stable either because you do get a dropped frame from traversal loading and anything that pops like text, the map, and pause menu...but it's the best of the both worlds. Battery life gets you under 3 hours.
My settings are high textures, high texture filtering, low volumetric and foliage, medium shadows and shadow filtering, ssao on, ssr off (it needs to be off because it makes image quality bad and takes away frames), and msaa 2x (not necessary but helps fidelity).
installed the FSR 2.0 mod
A lot of the interface text is difficult to read. Had use a mod to enlarge, now it's a better experience
If you run the game without optimizing and use the default settings, fps will NOT be stable.
The game is only playable and enjoyable using the nexusmod FSR 2.0. I have everything on high settings with FSR 2.0 set to performance. I got very stable 30fps with very minor dips when driving, but during a major shoot out? Stable 30fps. You could probably have the settings lowered and get more out of it, but I think visuals will suffer and this game was made to gawk at the scenery. Lastly, you'll have to play this game plugged unless you're playing for an hour.
It's 16:9 by default. You can use a mod by changing a piece of code in the exe file to enable 16:10.
It plays like online on a PC or PS5.
You're not going to get 60fps unless you sacrifice a lot of fidelity. But this game does give you a locked 40fps in high settings from beginning to end. You can probably count on one hand how many times it dips. A solid experience. PvP/multiplayer is a fun experience as well.
Framerate goes down at times during gpu heavy scenes
This game is not very kind when it comes to hitching. However, the steam deck (I was playing this game with the oled) has an advantage: precompiled shaders. That helps a lot with the stutter, however I was still experiencing them until I locked my gpu clock to 1600. When I did that, the stuttering vanished. The frame rate does drop, but it doesn't stutter. It makes the game so much more playable. Medium settings, fsr on auto, and locking fps to 30fps is a must in my opinion.
Multiplayer works. PvP, whether fun or not, works on the deck as it should.
Elden Ring is a 30fps game on the Deck. There's really no way of getting around that unless you want the game to look like a PS1 game. It's pretty stable throughout the game with high textures and everything else medium or low in 800p. I only noticed a significant stutter when I was dropping down to get to the frenzy flame room and one of those enemy used frenzy magic. It was the only time the game freaked out with stuttering. Other than that, you'll get a traversal stutter while riding Torrent but it's not frequent nor distracting. This game runs very well on the Deck, Tarnished.
You could do 60fps at a major sacrifice in fidelity but it's not worth it at all. You can also do 30fps but better, you can do 40fps and still have fidelity. The game is very intense on the graphics side and since it's unreal engine, you will get frame drops at times. It is inevitable.
With that said, in game I set resolution to 1152x720 windowed. Everything on low except post processing on very high, textures on high and view distance on medium. Use directx 11 since Ray tracing is off the table. Then use the steam deck FSR and set the sharpness to your liking. Lower your refresh rate to 40 and you got mostly stable 40fps while maintaining graphical fidelity.
40fps/40hz simply gives you 3 hours of battery life on high settings
Mad Max is an awesome game to play on the deck, but it's also a testament to how optimized the game itself really is. It's gorgeously detailed and the explosions are the best I've seen in any game in real-time.
Can you max out the settings? You sure can and you may get 60fps for the most part, but it won't be as stable as you think it would be. Capping it to 40/40 and you'll find much more pleasing results. However, since you're dealing with 800p, maxing out the settings doesn't do much. Set it to high settings and call it a day.
I did find one part of the game that caused really bad dips and I couldn't figure out why. In Gutgash's region where you find the sulfur deposits, it takes a bad dip in fps near the glowing green areas. Totally bizarre as I couldn't pinpoint what aspect of the settings would alleviate the dip. But outside of that, I haven't experienced anything like that.
My goal is stable 30fps with the best fidelity of the game I can get and the steam deck (as of the time of this post) delivers. If anyone had extended their vram in the bios to 4gb, then they're going to have to switch back to 1gb or else you will experience major stuttering by bodies of water. Once switched back to 1gb, the game runs very smoothly.
I'd also recommend giving yourself a 3000mb (the RDR2 vram, not total vram) vram budget in the graphic settings or else towns like Strawberry and Saint Denis will give you stutters/frame drops as low as 25fps. But don't fear because 3000mb can give you a lot of autonomy over the game's fidelity. I'd also recommend raising the taa sharpness to around 40% (which may cause minor smearness but you have to really look for it) because the game looks kinda soft on the deck.
This game is well-optimized that you have a lot of options in how you could improve battery life. I basically lowered resolution to 960x540, set everything to medium graphic settings except for texture which stay on high, use steam deck fsr (not in game), and I had 60fps with like almost 4 hours of battery life.
You can play this on the default settings but set your fps limit to 30fps....or find your graphical balance, play at 40 or 60fps and the fidelity of the game doesn't suffer much. A very well-made engine this game has.
The game crashed on me a couple of times and I've yet to figure out why.
Sekiro is a 40fps/40hz game. Medium texture and everything else either medium or low in 800p. The game does have traversal stutter that can't be mitigated unless you settle for 30fps, but it's not bad enough where you have to settle for it. 40fps can get you through the whole game. I'd also look into replacing your LB button too.
