'Too Big' for Steam Deck? 2022's Toughest Games Tested: Plague Tale, Callisto, The Witcher 3 + More! 

Key takeaway for me, if the game is even vaguely optimised for PC correctly, you can get it running on Steam Deck. Gotham knights and Callisto Protocol are not fair comparisons given their pc problems. Overall great video and interesting to see how Steam Deck is hanging in there

Really love when DF puts out content specific to the Deck.

I have a steam deck and I'm constantly amazed at the performance I get. Currently playing sekiro at a capped 45fps at 13 watts so I get about 3.5 hours of battery. It can handle higher settings and fps but I want the battery life.

If the MangoHud 30fps cap trick doesn't work (you get frame-skipping), try 31fps instead + the SteamOS 30fps limit. I've found that it always works at reducing input lag while maintaining vsync frame consistency.

It's worth tweaking the GPU Clock setting in the Quick Access menu, in some cases locking that to something high in GPU limited circumstances or low in CPU limited circumstances can net significantly more stable performance. (I've noticed this working particularly well in Cyberpunk with the clock set to 1500MHz.)

For Witcher 3 I'd recommend the DX12 version (steam preloads the shaders so no stutters) plus you get FSR which lets you play at 40fps with medium-high settings

I’d love these kind of videos every once in a while, could be helpful to do many people that are curious about wanting certain games on the deck

This is incredible stuff. I love how so many of these games downscale well - I play the deck exclusively in handheld so I’m not too stressed about visual fidelity compared to when I’m on my pc.

Ive noticed that when I first play games I need to play them on medium lot, but as time goes by, shaders and updates get applied, I can run demanding games on high/ultra settings a lot of the time. There's definitely a ton of optimization happening behind the scenes

I do love the analysis giving me proper settings to use on various hardware like the Steam Deck and even certain PC titles, per graphics card, etc. They've been a great help. Now I almost can't wait for Digital Foundry to talk more about Forspoken if only because it seems one of their favorite words is "Bespoke", so now they get to use the word "Forspoke".

Really enjoyed this, be interesting to see how the situation continues to develop between OS updates and new games with new technical requirements challenges. Would love to see DF make similar videos with last gen PC hardware (i.e how the original RTX 2000 series of GPU’s handle modern Ray Traced titles etc)

You can get the Callisto protocol to run at 30fps stable if you enable the use of other versions of proton.

Deck is good as a backlog and indie machine, except for the science there's no point in trying to run demanding AAA moviegames on the thing.

The steam deck has incredible performance for the price and certainly will last for a couple of years. Sometimes you just need to do a bit of tweaking to get the game to run well. I get a mostly solid 40fps in RDR2. In Assassin’s creed odyssey I get 45 -50 fps. I would recommend installing decky loader. Which can help you tweak your steam deck more by enabling large Linux pages and having the ability to tweak the cpu clock and the power to it. I also would recommend increasing the swap file size and changing dedicated vram for gpu to 4gb

I mostly play older games at 40fps and emulators on the deck. Its fun to tweak the settings for maximum battery life but without compromising the image too much

Limiting GPU clocks to about 1400mhz can be a magic bullet for CPU limited games. Elden Ring in particular can take some shockingly low GPU clocks before negative returns set in.

One big advantage of playing on a small screen is you won't really notice any graphical loss not playing on the highest graphical settings.

I wish more people made videos of older games that look and play great on Steam Deck. I definitely find that older games, like, even, say... Fallout 3 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Games that were available on console, but now you can get the console form factor+portability, much better performance, way better visuals (that look fantastic at 720p due to what they were targeting at the time), etc.... I might actually just start doing it myself. I just find that older games (that are so good they'd make you buy again as remasters to play like this on console) is where it really shines and frankly, deserves more attention than all these new games even if it doesn't make as good of a headline or video title.

Steam Deck has so much potential I can't wait for their next revision. Hopefully they can take the feedback and smooth out some edges here and there

I'm curious if the update Callisto Protocol came out with yesterday improves performance on Steam Deck at all. It's supposed to improve things on "all platforms" so maybe?

FYI: You can definitely go for the FPS cap in the Deck’s Quick Action Menu nowadays: With the recent SteamOS 3.4 update, Valve introduced an “allow tearing” toggle, which disables the otherwise forced systemwide and triple buffered V-Sync. Means: Disable any in-game caps such as FPS limit or V-Sync (where the latter would be otherwise the optimal alternative), cap the FPS via Quick Action Menu, and toggle “allow tearing” on. Et voila! Bonus: Disabling V-Sync also helps with more headroom for the game engine’s render pipeline.

Have you tested these games with a non stock steamdeck? Such as increased pagefile and powertools?

12:20 By lowering the 40-60 fps slider to something like 50 will have the other slider (the one that allowed you to select 30 fps) allow you to select 25 fps

You guys should be more rigorous testing the performance. For example, in plague tale requiem, there are tons of moments later in the game when the steam deck can't even hold 25 fps. The first two chapters are not so demanding at all.

It's remarkable how well the Steam Deck copes with newer games and it's doing better than a lot of us expected. With that in mind, I was under no illusion that once games really start to target the newer gen consoles, especially on the cpu and SSD front, that would cause problems for the Steam Deck, but honestly, we're two years in the new gen console cycle and these games are few and far between that push the Steam Deck to braking point and most games work well on it with the right settings and honestly, a big reason I like the Steam Deck is for lighter indie games, older games and emulators, it's nice that we can play newer demanding games but I rather play them on my desktop PC. As for the future, it's looking good for a Steam Deck 2, cpu and gpu performance should be a lot better by then, NVMe drive will likely be a standard by then and the software side with SteamOS and games support will likely be much better that it wouldn't surprise me if Valve doesn't want to release a Steam Deck 2 until the software side is mature enough that they can target a wider gaming audience and I suspect Valve could release a Steam Deck 2 shortly after Nintendo release a Switch 2 whiles also having a lot more units available for us, after all, the Steam Deck was a gamble for Valve, they didn't know how well the market would take to it, now that it's got a footing, they might go all out with a Steam Deck 2 with a lot more Decks available.

DF: you need to educate your new editors on shader cache, the guy is saying callisto protocol is maxing out the steam deck ("it is cpu limited as the performance counter hits 100% in parts") when in fact it's the game generating shader cache. Poor prep work on the editor's part

I've seen a lot of comments saying that as the steam deck only has one spec, with a largr user base developers will start optimizing games for the deck and while that sounds amazing, I don't think it's very realistic. There's no way developers will create optimized special settings forjust the deck as it would require much more work, so the most I'd expect are hand picked options for the deck to run well enough, but nowhere near the optimization something like the switch got.

great video. I wanna know, how did they find the strings to make Uncharted have reduce latency? I mean really, but good stuff.

Playing Witcher 3 and Elden Ring alot, runs fine. Recently beat Midnight Suns on the steam deck, just make sure to do the Vram fix and CryoUtilities fix. I like capping games at 40hz/40fps.

Excellent idea for a video. I don't own a deck but I love the coverage.

Love deck content. For these types of games I just stream to the deck using sunshine and moonlight from my gaming PC . That's a good option for people who have a deck and a gaming PC.

I can say that my experience with Gotham Knights was completely different. I ran it not on the lowest settings, they were low, but with some improvements, and yet I never experienced any seriously noticeable framedrops. There was short stuttering for couple seconds when moving from one part of the city to another, and there was some brief stuttering in fire-heavy open world sections (i've noticed it 2 or 3 times per my 22+ hour play). Also, it drained battery like crazy, so I got less then 2 hours of gameplay from one charge. But 99.5% of experience were smooth as butter even in the open world aread. Weird to see that your experience was different.

that a handheld pc can run those games at around 30 fps for a minimum of 400$ thats still damn impressive

This is to be expected. With handheld systems there will be compromises. I mainly use my steam deck to player old gen games and its been enjoyable.

I just hope developers continue to make games that are capable of playing on deck with medium to low settings and also run great on a powerful rig with max settings

Oh nice, I'm the person who discovered the mangohud input latency workaround. Good to see its been picked up here! Here's hoping valve improve the built in cap at some point, it would make a huge difference.

Very cool video thanks for sharing. I like to see how things can be optimised. However, I will still play games that don't run flawlessly, grew up loving ps1 and n64 so my tolerance for inconsistant framerates is pretty flexible. I will be playing the latest games on steam deck probably till 2033! LOL!

Really enjoying the “How does it run on Steam Deck” coverage, thanks for all you do, looking forward to more content!!

Thanks to channels like DF i will be picking up a steam deck soon with maybe a Dock to basically to replace my switch and be the console for my TV. 100s of steams and retro games on one system instead of using my PC to switch between my monitor and TV (plus i can play in bed)

It would be nice to have the option to use a double buffer vsync 30fps cap to alleviate input lag. The downside would be if the performance drops below 30fps it drops to 20fps but as long as you adjust the settings so it doesn't drop below 30fps it would be a good option.

i wonder how a cutdown 5800x3d type apu would perform. I'm waiting until steamdeck 2, but I'm hopeful given the current performance.

Can we slow down on the upgraded steam deck talk. I just got this thing 😩

I’d be curious to see the same tests after using the CryoUtilities and gpu memory tweak.

Finally someone talks about the issue with input latency when using the 30fps limit. I've been really frustrated with Elden Ring on the Deck, because even at the lowest settings and lowest available resolution, it doesn't run at a stable 40fps, but using the 30fps limit makes it more difficult to react to enemies in time. I did some frame counting and the 30 fps limit seems to add about 60ms of latency. Meanwhile streaming the game from my PC over the local network to my Steam Deck adds less than 10ms of latency compared to running it on the Deck uncapped.

Imagine if Deck had the same support for performance profiles they have for inputs. You just select a popular preset, then, possibly, get a list of settings to apply in game (or maybe even just sync the config file), and youre ready. But the Deck is very much for tinkerers anyway, so I guess its low on the list.

Love these Steamdeck vids. I am also very happy playing older games on it - so far anything up to 2018 seems to run flawlessly at 60fps with high settings. Titanfall 2 and Infjnite Warfare, two of my fave FPS campaigns, play like butter on steamdeck and look amazing. I can run cyberpunk at 30fps too, which seems amazing to me. SD is easily my favorite piece of gaming hardware, and I look forward to many years with it.

6:27 it’s funny to see that buildings in the background looks almost the same as in 20 years old NFS Underground.

The apu is something similar to a 1050ti. Now with the 7 inch screen you can get away with 800p or 720p resolutions because you still get food pixel density.

Waiting for the next gen of Steam Deck. I really want to have an OLED screen and generally a newer hardware inside. But what a beast even on gen 1!

Great video DF. The Steam Deck is very impressive as is but with each New Model that gets Released in the Future, the more Capable it will be Running the Newer Games hopefully.

i would like to see how the performance changes when steam deck is updated to have drivers that expose the gpl(graphics pipeline library) vulkan extension that is handy for an updated DXVK and VKD3D as part of proton. The Graphics pipeline library extension is useful to allow graphics library calls to be used instead of compiling shaders on the fly or relying on precompiled dxvk/vkd3d-vulkan shaders for much of the draw calls. The RADV driver also got a nice handy bump in draw call performance and a 10% reduction in draw call over head in recent release candidates of mesa 22.3.

Meanwhile in Nintendo Switch: "What's Tessellation?"

Steam Deck is great for 7th gen and most 8th gen games and below on-the-go as well as emulators. But 9th gen is a bit too demanding for the handheld.

Disabling SMT helps with some CPU bound games.. Also setting VRAM to 4GB. I am suprised that some of these werent tried here. Well I cant tell VRAM setting honestly, but SMT was definitly enabled, you can see that by core count. CryoUtillities, 4GB VRAM, and SMT are some stuff and settings that if you have steam deck you should proably look at it.

At 1:22 When you use resolution optimizer in plague tale, then you are noting really running native resolution. In other words, it running below 720p

A Phoenix Point apu seems like something Valve would get a lot of mileage out off, given RNDA 3's duel ALU set up benefits greatly from hand tweaked shaders to target synchronous execution of some instructions. And since Valve controls the hardware + platform, they can push the optimized shaders with ease.

The Steam Deck's built in frame rate limiter introduces a lot of latency compared to using the in-game frame rate limiter in my experience, so if the game has a limiter I would use that over the Deck's. But it varies game by game so make sure you test.

So many videos lately... Many thanks to the digital foundry team.

The “brrrrrt” at 3:35 caught me of guard. I know it’s not suppose to be this funny, but. :)

Would be interesting to see if DX11 really has lower CPU usage in Witcher on the deck. Because in the end DX11 and DX12 both end up as Vulkan.

witcher 3 is supposed to get patched in a week or so hopefully it fixes the cpu demand

One interesting thing i discovered is 29 or 28 fps mode. It can help in some instances where power scaling is weird like in elden ring. Boosts battery life quite nicely

maybe you can do a round 2 of these test wherein you apply Cryo33 performance tweaks (vram, swap file, swappiness adjustment)? It helps alot i tell you that..

It is amazing that these big PC titles play on a handheld at this price range. I think its important to keep in mind that this is not a machine aimed at top tier graphics titles although it's very cool that it can run them at 30fps with some dips (title depending). The deck is really a console per se, and developers who do PC, PS5 and XBSeries games can easily tweak the PC titles for a Steam Deck profile which could be separate from PC.. offering more subtle tweaking to settings to achieve a constant 30fps (or more) as if it was a console-ish target. I got mine to play recent to older titles that I wanted to revisit or missed, but it's very cool to know it can run current gen and PC titles - now all it needs is for developers to add steam deck as a "console" target and make sure these titles play at a consistent 30fps minimum.

I played through the Witcher at 40fps instead of 30. I highly recommend it, it's much more smooth this way. The biggest settings to get you to 40fps is to turn down the NPC count to the lowest setting and to turn down the grass/foliage setting to the lowest density, the game still looks great this way and performs much better, especially in Novigrad where it normally struggles the most.

Love the steam deck videos! Keep em coming 👍

Protip, lock the deck to 45fps then adjust graphics settings per title to keep stable frame rate. Saves quite a bit on battery and still feels super smooth.

Could you do a check to see if there are any worthwhile differences while using it docked to a separate monitor?

Remember when “current gen” portable hardware was little more than a glorified calculator? Think Game & Watch, Tiger Electronics Handhelds, even Konami made a few. It’s easy to forget that portability has always cost something. We’ve come so far that we lose sight of any sacrifice at all until we hit the limits. We forget the trade-offs necessary. For the longest time, portable gaming meant heavy compromise-static LCD screens with hand drawn art, then 4-color displays, always significant processor cut-downs from desktop/primary consoles, etc. While the Steam Deck may not show out on every modern title, it seems to me that it is carrying the baton further than any other portable device before it. Pushing the limits and making us re-examine what they really are. While the handheld space existed before the Deck, the Deck is changing the way we consider gaming, portability, and what it means to have to compromise (or not). Thank you for your continued great work, DF!

Thank you for talking about the huge input lag with the built-in frame limiter. It's almost unusable and the lack of other options really hurts the otherwise excellent experience i'm having using the Steam Deck. For now i'm just avoiding playing anything that needs to be capped at 30 FPS.

The fun part about the Steam Deck is the Modularity, once those new chips come out, if enabled to be compatible, ohoho, upgrading is going to be the most satisfying process, just like anyone else I don't have much experience with opening up electronics, more than most yes, but its only because I have the mindset to want to learn all this stuff, the first thing I'm doing when my steam deck arrives tomorrow is upgrade the 64eMMC with a WD 2TB SSD, so it's gonna be a fun experience imo, I don't mind doing it myself as this is how we learn after all... and lots of youtube videos XD

High CPU utilisation can be due to high system ram and vram consumptions which require the CPU to work harder to compress the memory with zRAM as the memory between CPU and GPU is shared. So graphics budget can impact CPU performance in this case too.

Great video again by the folks at DF. I am impressed as much as the next guy to see the deck running current gen titles at all. However in my opinion, older games (8th gen and below) is what I'll be using the steam deck especially for emulation which it runs like a dream. It's an effective machine for all of us gamers to finish the backlog of games we wanted to play on our consoles and PCs. I even got project brutality working on it and it's like a dream come true for me. These are the type of things I thought the switch should be handling especially 7 gen games and older, but yeah it is what it is. Anyways, since Sony is off the handheld market, this is the best thing the brilliant people at Valve came up with and I'm happy to give Valve my money.

Thanks again DF, you guys just keep delivering the goods 👌🏻

My only question is did you guys set vram on steam deck to 4gb when you tested these game because I heard some games run better with 4gb vram turned on

I personally noticed that using powertools to keep CPU max clock under 3000 will reduce heat and allows gpu to be used more, thus improving some games performance

I'm thinking of getting either a steam deck or switch oled while I'm in hospital. What would people recommend?

I mean...unoptimized games will make the most powerful rigs seem alot less weaker, doom eternal on the deck runs at 800p 60 on high to ultra settings

Whoa! What's with the glitch on Elena's hair (8:43)? Never seen that before on either PS4, PS5 or Steam Deck ...

Great video. Well in depth discussion. You definitely earned my subscription.

I love the Steam Deck! I think it is an amazing device! I think all owners know that there are going to probably be games in the near future that just wont run good on it. But what it can do, its freaking awesome! Give it a year or two, and I imagine Valve will finally give us a Steam Deck 2 or 3 that gives much closer to console performance. I am very happy at the moment, but excited for the future!

I love everything about the Steam Deck! As a new dad with almost little to no time playing games anymore, this is perfect for me! Even the battery life is more than enough for me (Im lucky if I even get 30 minutes of gaming time) However, I just dont have the extra cash (and time right now) right now to get one. Maybe Ill just wait for a sale after a year or so or the 2nd iteration.

I guess what the SteamDeck and other handheld PC devices show is that there is increasing demand for capable APUs. I would love to see APUs in the future that can compete with low spec GPUs at some point.

Sweet spot is 1025x576 resolution, image still looks sharp with FSR enabled.

The problem is that games these days focus more on graphics than if people can actually play them. Settings should have more power in this

I would've loved to see Elden Ring on here. In my experiences playing it on deck, it's been soooo close to great, without getting there. 30fps lock through the steamdeck's system controls is fine, but the latency is about double what it should be for 30fps. It's bizarre, and makes for a rather muddy game experience.

we can try mitigations=off in kernel parameter to get performance bost :)

Heads up, many of the frame time issue can be solved by pinning the gpu to 1600ghz in the quick access menu. This is because the steam deck APU sometimes struggles to balance power between the cpu & gpu performance, by pinning the gpu stability is improved in games with gpu bottlenecks. Also with your Witcher 3 comparison, it is important to note that screen space reflections have a significant performance impact on the deck compared to other settings; I have been able to achieve a relatively stable 40fps/40hz on Witcher 3 with mid-high settings minus SSR.

Thanks for noting the input delay. Think you guys could take a look at competitive titles like fighting games or shooters and see how much performance you can get with the lowest input delay? The lowest latency I was able to get to with FPS uncapped was about 66ms, but fighting games, I can tell you, demand lower input delay when possible, and typically we can get that lower latency on PC, but not on Steam Deck.

Wait... I thought the input latency issue when using the framerate limiter was solved with the last Steam OS update. Would have been nice to have a confirmation of which Steam OS was being utilized for these tests.

Phoenix point APU at 15w would be incredible. Allowing the CPU to clock up to say 4.5Ghz would make a massive difference for CPU limited games.

Very nice so see how well current games can run on the deck, respecting that this is a handheld. But I personally agree to your statement @ 11:19 as I use it for older/more casual games as well and keep AA/AAA games to my Xbox Series X or PC, so I don't really need more performance. Are there a lot of people that actually use the Steam Deck as their only platform and want to play current/upcoming AAA games on it?

It astounds me just how poorly optimized Gotham Knights is.

Cheers and much respects to all the DF team from the Steam Deck community!

I dont know man, A Plague Tale: Requiem i feel like its super unoptimized, knowing how games work and all we have games that look better have 10 times more things and have a 100 times bigger map and still runs heaps better while looking better idk.

FYI, I know this is aimed more at out of the box settings but increasing UMA frame buffer and swapfile size, and swappiness via desktop mode sometimes squeezes out an extra bit of performance to hit 40-45 fps in more demanding games. Definitely helps with games like Witcher 3.

Honestly don't see why people wouldn't just play on a laptop. Xbox Series controller and your good with most mid range laptops.

I want to see Digital Foundry target 40FPS on Steam Deck and use 30FPS as a fallback.

Haha I was just min-maxing Bright Memory Infinite to see how well I can run it on the Deck, this is perfect. I guess some games just aren't meant to be, but I bet they could have optimized some of these to run better if they really wanted to. But I've found a new appreciation for PS3-era games, like Remember Me still looks gorgeous and I can set the graphics to High and still only use about 30% of the Deck GPU! I might not have spent my desktop hardware going back to that, but it makes for a delightful bus ride.

One question have you optimized your deck with cryo utilities? How much it helps varies from game to game but I've found it has improved most games I have played giving me a rock solid locked 40fps or better in most games.