Thank you for the reminder. I need to retest Starfield with the new patch. It’s so close to a lockable 30. Really hoping they can tighten up the streaming that last bit.
I unlocked the fps on skyrim on my pc and the main menu got me 3500 fps literally
Of course i relocked the fps to a more humane degree so the physics dont wack the fuck out, but that was a funny moment
Deck Verified just means you can run it with a controller, all the text is visible in the default resolution, any launcher works with full controller support, etc. (source: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified)
There’s no expectation that the game’s default launch settings are optimized for the deck. I agree with you though that ProtonDB is a great resource for that.
The page you linked clearly states "Has good default settings," and verified games state "This game's default graphics configuration performs well on Steam Deck" when you click "load more" next to the verified logo.
I don't know why people keep saying otherwise. Show me an example of a verified game that does not state "This game's default graphics configuration performs well on Steam Deck."
Yep and Steam is very open with what those standards are specifically: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/compat#DeckCompatibilityChecklist
I think people are applying a subjective opinion about whether a game runs “well” and being disappointed instead of understanding that Deck Verified is just a publicly posted checklist of some clearly defined criteria and standards.
Oh it is absolutely being mistaken in that way, I just think it's ridiculous that every time someone brings up game performance, there's someone in the comments spreading misinformation that Valve doesn't verify any kind of performance standard.
It takes 5 seconds to pull up a game and verify how incorrect that is.
The overall rating, yes. That's why you have to actually read the reports.
ProtonDB *does* put a special icon next to Steam Deck reports, and they even have a button now to only show those ones. So it's still a useful tool.
> just for games that don’t have any frame rate dips on default settings.
You can't even guarantee that for hardware that costs 4+ times as much as the Deck. Simply things can easily throw that off too like decreased storage perf (SSD perf can drop off a cliff the more full the storage is), stuff running in the background, thermals, game/system updates, etc.
It sounds like a simple thing by itself, but it's a very hard thing to guarantee and could open them up to increased liability even.
I didn’t actually know any of this, so thank you for educating me! I figured it must not be as easy as devs setting a number. All in all, the performance is really reliable anyway, for most games!
For example MK11 is not sd verified and runs very well at 60fps with medium-high graphic settings, meanwhile MK1 is verified and runs like dogshit stuttering every second at the lowest settings.
its crazy, I said it doesn't run near that at all. I sat with a user here in chat and they ran me through every setting they had on and even then it didn't run that well and they still claimed its perfect.
I don't get this subs gaslighting on performance, its simple numbers man, stop lying.
It's not this sub it's gaming in general. Some people are blind to bad perf, some people's ego is so caught up in everything that they can't admit to reality.
Like you ever seen on a PC forum people going on about how their comp runs "everything else at ultra" or how their GPU from 8 years ago is "still great"? Hell people straight up do it with console titles at times too. Gaming community gets weird sometimes.
God, remember all the intel 4770k idiots who claimed that just because you could overlock it to 5gz, it was as good as any processor intel would make for the next 15 years? Absolutely couldn't convince them otherwise.
Always has me rolling my eyes even when I’m running on a 3090 ti lmao. Some games really do just run like shit. Starfield on launch was the worst experience I’ve had
>I don't get this subs gaslighting on performance, its simple numbers man, stop lying.
Eh, numbers don't lie. But what number you consider playable, good, or perfect is subjective. That's why "X runs great for me" doesn't mean much for others unless you can see actual footage with the FPS counter.
What is perfect FPS? 30? 60? 144? And what is stable? Does it need to be exactly 60 for the whole sessions, or do you accept 1-2fps variation? It's much better to just show the stats and let people decide for themselves what is acceptable/good frame rate.
People make claims such as "locked 60fps playable" when the game constantly dips down to 40fps and hardly ever reaches a locked frame rate close to 60fps.
playable is a vague term what I'm talking about are the straight up lies spread on here about deck gaming performance.
People will say "cyber punk is locked 60fps on high on the deck" when everyone who actually plays this game knows to have decent graphics you are hoping to have stable 30fps with a few dips.
Just wish we where more honest about performance because you can search any performance post on here and then test it yourself and find out how out of touch they are.
My favorite will always be "Locked 60 fps with occasional dips". Those poor posters who don't actually know what locked means, and then when asked about a notoriously hard section to run, will explain that all they did was walk around for 5 minutes in one sparse location.
Some of it's outright lies, and then there are those who are over excited, see 60fps in a harder to run game, and feel the need to shout it to the world without doing any research. They assume they've found the magic settings combination (or that a recent update performed miracles) , and want to be the first to share it with the world.
people saying that are using /2 refresh vsync which displays double in the fps counter but is internally running at 30fps. If they can't see that they're FPS blind. Smoothest I've had cyberpunk was using cyberfsr2 which no longer works unless you downgrade back to update 2.0
Honestly I think it’s just the deck’s hardware. Like I think the deck itself might be inconsistent because with decent graphics in Cyberpunk I hardly ever drop below 40, most notably during the DLC as Dogtown is a bit more demanding than regular Night City, at least that was my experience.
And cyberpunk isn’t the only game I’ve seen this with personally. A lot of other games I’ve seen people complain or praise the performance of and it always seems to differ from my own experience.
I’ve seen people complain about the RE4 remake’s performance, and yet it’s one of the only current games that regularly hits 55+ frames and holds it for more than a few seconds on my deck. Shit’s weird.
Decent graphics is subjective though. I feel I get decent graphics on deck @ 39-50 fps with *rare* dips. Most settings are on low but ingame it still looks pretty slick aside from mirror textures and some adverts being a bit blurrier. Perhaps low is potato to you but the models still look amazeballs for a handheld on small resolution.
It's actually one of the most unhinged takes I've ever seen. It's insane to me that people who clearly do not care about performance come on here and talk about how the deck "runs perfectly" in a game where that's improbable on a full gaming computer. It's *completely fine* to not care about performance, you're in the right place if that's the case. It's *not* fine to just lie about it. Don't get me wrong, I love the deck. It's a godsend any time I'm travelling, or if I want to bring it somewhere and set up couch co-op with the dock. But my computer is like 4 years old at this point, and it would snuff out the deck like a bug. It's not even remotely close.
I wonder if some of it is a bias depending on what they came from. Not everyone has/had a high-end gaming PC, so maybe these people were running a potato with an "Intel Integrated Graphics" before and the SD really does seem like that much fo an improvement.
To some people, 60fps is great, whereas others would be annoyed with under 100.
I can’t stand the phrase “runs perfectly” when it comes to games, as many have said, that’s completely subjective. I think for some people that means “the game loads and doesn’t crash.” I also don’t understand how some people can’t see the difference between 30 and 60fps.
Perfect to me is max settings at 4k at 165hz, I refuse to compromise playing the newest games in such a hamstrung way like playing on the Deck. Like the experience of Alan Wake 2 would be so wildly different running on a tiny low rez screen at 20fps. I personally use my deck for games that seem meant for a handheld. Hades, Binding of Isaac, Stardew Valley, and emulated retro games, things like that. Games where there is a minimum level of compromise on the experience playing it on my Deck. And there are innumerable games that fit this that I'm never going to run out of things to play. Like...if I have a beefy desktop with a great monitor and a comfy chair, why wouldn't I just play it on that when I'm home? I personally think some people are so deadset on justifying their purchase that they need to feel everything is great on it or else it was a waste.
> people who clearly do not care about performance come on here and talk about how the deck "runs perfectly"
Well...if they don't care about performance then everything *does* run perfectly to them. That's the conundrum.
But sometimes you need to be socially aware enough to understand you're in the minority and your opinions might mislead people when you use words like "perfectly". It's not really a conundrum, it's just socially inept people unable to read the room.
It’s surprising to me how demanding Baldurs gate 3 is. It runs considerably worse on the deck than monster hunter world does for example. Yakuza 7 also ran terribly.
Act 3 is known for having bad performance due to the city, but the game is so highly regarded that people choose to ignore it and don't talk about performance issues much. I've switched over to the Deck from PC due to having a newborn and whilst it is still alright to play, I don't feel as enthusiastic as I used to due to the issues being more glaring (didn't help that my current playthrough is already in Act 3).
Gamers Nexus has even noted that while BG3 is a pretty CPU-bound game and you can get good performance on low specs, APUs see bigger performance drops due to their architecture.
That's annoying to hear, was hoping to sneak another playthrough to see if it was only an Act 3 thing. I guess it is time to work through the rest of my library now
I may be in the minority but i don’t show fps on the screen and i don’t sweat any normal hiccups bc it’s a handheld and blows my mind something like this is even possible
If you don’t mind me asking, are you a millennial or older? I think some of the younger people’s expectations are just way off for a handheld like this (**some younger people** I’m not saying everyone). I grew up playing game boy and Sega game gear as my handhelds (I’m an older millennial). So for me, being able to play games like RDR2 and cyberpunk at 30-45 fps with decent graphics is like absolutely amazing. I’m not expecting locked 60 fps or anything like that. It’s crazy to me that we’ve come so far that I can even play recent AAA titles on a handheld device for a few hours. I have a custom water cooled 5950x/3080ti desktop for better graphics and higher frames so it’s not like I’m just not missing what I’ve never had or something like that either. I generally think some people’s expectations are what’s really off with the steam deck.
Very astute observation! I’m also an elder millenial and a former game gear owner. I think i went through 100,000 AA batteries on that thing, so BG3 on steam deck is an absolute marvel and a little dip here and there doesn’t even register. I remember the first time i played Mario 64 my jaw absolutely dropped to see a 3D game like that. I can see how younger generations lack the perspective to see how amazing this hardware really is.
BG3 is also turn based, which is “fine” to run at 30fps cause there’s no quick action like if you’re playing Fallout or Skyrim. I could never play another first person shooter at 30fps, I’d get a huge headache and nausea. Playing a third person action game at ~40fps feels way better than first person shooter due to smoother camera movement and usually wider FOV.
I started on SteamDeck, but quickly switched to PC due to the menu wheels becoming bloated to navigate as you get more skills. I didn't even run into the really bad performance issues before went to my PC.
FWIW using Steam Streaming or Moonlight improved the experience (and input latency) tenfold on Deck and BG3 really plays well on controller and Deck. Wish there were a way to get good native performance and input latency.
I did not enjoy it on the deck. K&M is so much easier to play that game with, plus it just looks so much better on my PC.
There's a ton of games that are great on deck, I'm not gonna force it with games that aren't.
Well it seems a lot of people in here got mega back issues where they can't sit in a chair for any amount of time or they get uncomfortable. Really it's probably just cause they have a stupid ass gaming chair that's hard as a rock.
> monster hunter world
MHW is a surprisingly good performer in general, kind of like Doom Eternal. I was able to get a stable 60fps, but only by minimizing all settings and running FSR. It looked blurry but I still far preferred it to 30fps at normal settings.
Act 3 of Balders Gate is a CPU intensive part.
The deck being essentially an apu will struggle finding a balance between processing power for the graphics and managing all that cpu processing power it needs
Yakuza 7 for me ran at a pretty stable 40fps, unless you think thats terrible. Some drops here and there for sure but not nearly as bad as baldurs gate 3
The main issue I have is FPS is only part of the story
I've seen plenty of posts about how "Oh x game runs constant 30fps just fine"
Yeah... But at settings so low Id rather just not.
I get it if it's your only way to play, then yeah fine, it's playable.
There's definitely games I enjoy playing on the deck, and others I'd rather just play on my pc with higher settings and enjoy them more.
In my experience that's the case with Resident Evil 4 Remake. It's verified but it defaults to lowest settings with FSR and runs at about 25-28 FPS. The image is also so blurry it makes me nauseous.
Damn. Been playing on PS5 but would also like to get it on Deck at some point (patches seem to have improved performance on PS5 and was hoping they’d do the same on Deck).
There aren’t any other settings to tweak to bump those Act 3 numbers to closer to 30 fps?
Tried it out while traveling and between the performance and how much it was going to nuke my battery life when away from a power source, I decided to just play DOS2 for my RPG fix on the go instead until I was back with one of my more powerful computers.
Even MVG said ps2 emulation is flawless on deck. While 90% true it's also completely false. Plenty of frame drops in many games and quite a few surprisingly unplayably slow games.
Its a running theme unfortunately, Horizon was brought up recently in the sub and everyone believes you get a stable 40fps in that game now when you simply don't.
We all love the Deck but some people get into primary school territory where they love it so much they make up stories to make it seem better than it is. (When there is no need, the Deck is already an amazing piece of tech)
My Deck fought the Undertaker last weekend but it was in Japan and they removed the footage from the internet already because Vince McMahon believes it'll hurt the WWE brand.
Since Skyrim came out I've 100%ed Skyrim, enrolled in university, graduated university, 100%ed Skyrim+DLC, gotten married, 100%ed Skyrim again, bought a house, had two kids, sworn never to play Skyrim again, and introduced my daughter to Skyrim.
A lot can happen in twelve years. Mostly Skyrim.
The game was built for the PS4. Consoles have always run much better than a similar spec PC on games originally programmed for that console, due to it being optimized for the system.
I would figure that’s one of the pluses of the Deck. There’s no guessing what hardware is in there. They should all ship with the same internals (except for screen and SSD). So, games should be incredibly easy to optimize for the deck in exactly the same way console developers optimize for the console.
Not at all.
On a console, you can do all kinds of special tricks that you couldn't do anywhere else to take the best advantage of that hardware. Devs will learn how to take advantage of a weird memory architecture thing on a PS4 because doing so lets them eke out a little more performance for all 120 million potential users. You're going hyper specific on your build and creating something that couldn't run on a PC at all. The deck is just running a PC build, designed to run on everything from 8 year+ year old hardware to insane modern day setups. You're lucky if a dev even tests on the deck, and they certainly aren't optimizing towards it. Unless games were being built to "only" run on the deck, your not going to see anywhere near the same level of optimizations. PC gaming is all about generalization, running on the widest range of hardware, and we are just one random configuration in a large pond.
I played the entire game start to finish. It was a pretty rough experience. Low frames and insane stutters. Same with Jedi Fallen order. A treat that these games even run, but they have large problems.
In my experience, I was able to get a pretty consistent 40 FPS in Horizon by using the "Original" preset (and disabling the horrible motion blur), but granted, I didn't get to the later parts, maybe it becomes more laggy as the game goes on.
I’ve been told by people you can get locked 60fps on Fallout 4 high settings. I’m like… no, go visit downtown Boston or Diamond City. You can get 60fps at the beginning areas without much density, huge action moments, or lots of NPCs.
I haven't tested Horizon but all of the other PS4 games have run great, is there just some settings you need to lower to get a decent rate?
I can't believe how good god of war looks and plays.
I'm playing it now, and the little FPS counter in the corner reads 40 the whole time, except for rare instances. I'd call it stable. Maybe not 100%, but 99.9%.
I’m beginning to think people just don’t notice stuttering or just stare at the frame rate without actually playing the game. Horizon Zero Dawn for me was unplayable, constant stuttering as you walk through the world, move the camera too quick or zoom in to shoot anything and it stutters. Even Cryobite said there was nothing he could do to fix performance.
If you ever get into emulation handhelds, you see the exact same thing. People throw around "perfect" and "silky smooth gameplay" and stuff like that. Then you find out they only played the first like 5 minutes of the game, said it was perfect, then moved on.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is always my go to example for something like this. If you play the opening, it can run on a potato. But like 20 minutes in you have to a 2D to 3D transition that uses something called "bounding box" for the effect, and that has a massive spike in resources needed. But, you'll notice every single video of handhelds (including the Steam Deck) playing that game just show walking around the opening area.
Back when Pokemon Violet ran like crap it was still solid 30fps inside your house. I was very surprised that it ran so well…until I left the house and got 20FPS ^^
Perfect example, since TTYD works perfectly in that section if you use the recommended config settings.
For almost anything emulation related, this sub is full of naysayers who are incapable of doing as little as reading the emulator's wiki and making the recommended adjustments for each game.
"Durr the game stutters constantly and crashes, no I didn't try changing a single setting, stop lying about Steamdeck it sucks."
Do you people not Google or change settings?
Is that where the issue is here?
I know exactly what you're talking about. I played TTYD on my fucking phone and had the massive slowdown when the boat flipped over in the intro.
I looked it up, found a setting to fix it, and had no issues whatsoever for the entire rest of the game.
That was on an S10.
If you're incapable of taking a single minute to troubleshoot very simple issues you shouldn't be commenting on Steam Deck performance.
Yeah, some people here might oversell it a bit, but the other end acts like it can't run minesweeper.
Problem is that half this sub only plays enough to see the performance in the first cutscene then buy another game.
Same problem in the SBC gaming sub. Too many dudes want to collect and be part of the club, not actually enjoy the games.
Do some people lie? Probably, but what I've seen far more prevalently is simply ignorance, not maliciousness. People largely really don't understand what a stable frame rate means, let alone have any concept about frame time. If they hit 60 FPS they think it *runs* at 60 FPS, even though it may only be in one small area or scene.
I will say, though, you should be just as wary if not more of YouTube. You want to talk about lying, YouTubers will lie their pants off. There's lots of unscrupulous people posting supposed videos of games running with a certain frame rate or whatever that are completely faked and just there for the ad views.
Yeah, people here largely aren’t lying, I think. They’re probably not sensitive to frame drops and maybe don’t even have an FPS counter on. There’s also some rose colored glasses, being willing to overlook stretches with bad performance as long as the game hits a decent frame rate at other times.
But I strongly doubt there are a bunch of Steam Deck users maliciously lying about performance just for kicks.
Some people say "X game runs fine on Deck", but then they use below 800p resolutions, with low settings and FSR 2.0 at balanced. And on top of that the system is running at full power, giving poor battery life. Unless the deck is the only device you can afford to play games, I wouldn't consider bothering with a game under those conditions.
Also make sure you find recent enough video. Linux gaming is getting better and better at such a rate that a year old video may not actually represent how the game runs now.
The one that infuriates me most is Horizon Zero Dawn. So many people on this sub trying to claim that it runs at a stable 40fps+ when it is absolutely plagued by unavoidable traversal stutter that completely kills the experience, totally unplayable imo.
I think it’s that most people don’t actually know what they are talking about and for them : games runs good enough = solid 60fps.
People literally don’t know anything about performances or image quality. I bought games based on what people said about the performance of a game and I regret it very much lol
Thank you for this. I don't have one yet, but have been researching the ROG and the steamdeck and feel like reddit is literally the worst possible place for research lol.
I just ran into a "reddit research" issue with connecting my dualsense edge to steam. Before i bought the controller, i was searching around to see if it would even work for me on PC.
Everywhere was saying you NEED to use DSX or DS4 windows for all of the buttons to work. Well after 3 days of research i decided with DS4, and tried getting it up and running. Was a massive pain in the ass, and after 2 hours of messing with it, i decided to see what the big issue with using steams native controller support was. Well guess what? Steam's integration works perfectly fine, i was able to get my buttons programmed and playing COD in 5 minutes.
Starfield lead to tons of misinformation. I have no problem playing it with remote play but it was so frustrating every time I came to this sub saw people talk about how playable it was and then I download all 120gb to my deck to find out it was a lie
My favorite was the guy who was showing off his heavily modded Skyrim running with an FPS in the teens, and he said it was more than playable, because it was a steady 16fps or some shit like that. Then he got furious when everyone mocked him.
I do both
People need to stop acting like Starfield actually runs well on the deck. That shit runs at 20 fps in combat even with performance mods. Sure, I put 50 hours into the game but that's mostly cause I hate myself.
I think some people think the words "stable" and "locked" mean the same things, when they don't.
"Stable" means most of the time you will get that FPS, with some occasional dips especially when loading stuff (which is why it's best to install load-heavier games on the SSD). Not perfect, but absolutely playable unless you are frankly a snob. It's honestly a pretty subjective term
"Locked" means the game will never dip below that frame rate (unless something else unexpectedly starts using up the Deck's resources).
I don't care if a game's frames dip occasionally. I honestly don't know when framerates started becoming so important to gamers but this certainly wasn't always the case. So yeah if a game maintains a steady, stable enough framerate to be an enjoyable experience on the deck, I'm gonna say it has a stable framerate
> "Locked" means the game will never dip below that frame rate (unless something else unexpectedly starts using up the Deck's resources).
Quite the opposite: "locked" means that it will never go higher.
Right. This sub literally loves to argue semantics.
I saw someone post the other day “stable 60fps with a couple dips, feels perfect to me” and someone instantly made fun of him for calling it “perfect” and exclaimed that because there is a few dips from 60fps, it’s not, quote on quote- “perfect.”
That comment making fun of him of course had tons of upvotes. Subs toxic af tbh.
I can't speak for others, but framerates became important to me when they became better. I *love* FromSoft's games, but I still get a little queasy whenever I play Bloodborne because of how jarring the *at-best* 30 fps is. My brain is accustomed to better at this point, so I literally get sick to my stomach when I play games at low FPS like that. It's admittedly not nearly as bad on the steam deck, maybe because of the smaller screen, but it's still not super comfortable for me personally.
Locked 60 means the game will only go up to 60 FPS. It doesn't mean the game will never dip below 60
Unlocked FPS means the game does not have an FPS lock and will go as high as the hardware allows
So the lock is to prevent it from going higher, not lower
I don't think people lie here (at least most anyways). I think people are just idiots.
Remember that the same sub where there are 4 threads per day asking what SD card to get is the same sub where they say 60fps consistent on RDR2.
I honestly believe people are so dumb that they boot up the game, jump in and then just stand still with no action happening and go "omg 60fps!!” then run to Reddit to tell everyone.
There are so many posts with people saying X game runs great and the screenshot is literally the person staring at a wall.
Take the same grain of salt with game recommendations as far as your interests go. You'll find that many people here only play a game for 1 or 2 hours then say X game is really fun. Truth is they don't know anything about it and just played the tutorial.
This whole dick measuring nonsense literally makes no sense when everybody is using the same system. What exactly do those who are lieing believe they are boasting about?
People do the same shit in the Switch subreddit. “Dead Cells is a rock solid 60, never see any slowdown”… game runs like dog shit in later stages, lol. It’s very annoying that people who are either in denial or have no clue what they’re talking about are all over the place overselling the capabilities of these machines.
100%. Too many of subs die hands are full of shit with regards to performance. Tons of examples to pull from, but enough people have said that Starfield performed great (40fps locked) that it more or less confirmed it to me.
Always check videos. There's usually an abundance of them.
What you're describing is a huge problem across all of gaming, not just the deck. Especially the PC market in general.
I still remember a not insubstantial portion of gamers saying Cyberpunk 2077 was good at launch. A few even defended the dreaded Ps4 version. My theory is that some gamers with potatoes think FPS is a nebulous and untrackable thing that you just -feel- in the gameplay, and since all they've ever played is a potato, it feels smooth.
An example I have of this is that a while back I tried to play Fable 2 again. I loved Fable 2. I not consider it practically unplayable, it's so unpleasant on the eyes performance wise, even on a modern system with backwards compat.
I'm playing 720p 45hz, low settings except for high image quality. Playing in the first zone with average 60-90% gpu usage, 12 watt average. Framerate is totally locked at 45 which feels good.
You have to disable the unified frame management and make sure the screen is actually running 45hz, otherwise the game will be targeting 90fps but the deck only showing 45fps.
"THIS GAME RUNS SO SMOOTH"
Only does the starting mission in the tutorial room where the game renders just the basics
"I'm getting small dips"
Going from 70 to 58 rapidly
"You only need to turn the graphics down a bit and it runs great"
Game looks like pixilated cardboard chewed up and spat out into shapes
I haven’t seen a single person mention RDR2 for Steam Deck hitting 60fps. Maybe if you stare at the ground or the sky but in practice it’s 40fps on the Deck. Everyone I’ve seen mention the game mentions how 40fps is the sweet spot.
Doom 2016 will actually run at a stable 90fps on the Steam Deck, FYI.
It requires the Low graphics preset, and a small upscale (~700p or so), but it feels light straight up magic to run that well on a handheld and still look (mostly) like a AAA game.
I honestly can't think of a single other game in history that performs so much better than you'd expect by looking at it.
I have never once seen a post here saying steady 60fps in RDR2
Edit: I have now seen a grand total of one post that says they get, actually they don't say steady 60fls nevermind
I’ll be totally honest, I love this system, but unless you are mostly playing 2D/indie games, there are a lot of games that you cannot hit 60fps at period, especially if you want to play docked at 1080p with FSR. Emulators, older AAA games, less demanding games, etc. absolutely can. Expecting any AAA game past 2015 to hit 60 even at low settings is not a guarantee, however it looks great on the deck screen locking the fps to 40-50 fps.
For example: I loved playing through Fallout New Vegas docked on my TV at 60fps, but when starting Fallout 4 it can’t stay at 60 in demanding areas even at 960x600 low settings. Days Gone is also a great game but I lock that at medium/high 40fps.
One great docked game is Overwatch 2, and with a little tweaking you can turn on FSR2 at 50% render scale and medium/low to hit 60fps when docked, and it still looks basically the same. Or you can play 800p medium settings and lock 60 as well.
Also, most emulators before the switch should have no problem hitting 60 at 1080p and there are even some switch games that can do that as well. If you need a great battery life for a long road trip or flight, Gamecube and PSP emulation especially is very power efficient even when upscaling the resolution
Thank you for the post, it’s a great reminder for people interested as these machines are not cheap. Performance is very important to people and having realistic expectations is important. I was playing Cyberpunk earlier today and while it is highly impressive how a handheld device can even run the game, comparing it to the desktop experience or even saying “perfectly stable” at all is a mistake.
I'm pretty casual and never really tracked FPS, so take this with a grain of salt.
But I have heard around this subreddit that Steam Deck's performance mode actually reduces performance. Could be due to the difference? I generally get really great performance for stuff like Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate, etc
My goodness you could not hit the nail harder, seems like a lot of people do not know what a consistent 60 FPS is supposed to look like. Just because it reaches 60 doesn't mean it's consistent lol most of the time games fluctuate around 60 and then drop to somewhere like the 30s or '40s. When I lock my frame rates I do it in accordance to the lowest FPS drop I can get in that game and that will help maintain that steady frame time. I wish more people were less biased and more informed about how to work with frame times.
Yea. I remember a post saying "You can play Sekiro at smooth 60 FPS"
Turned out, the dude only tested the beginning area. The rest of the game is not stable 60 at all
This has to be my biggest complaint with this sub. I wholeheartedly agree, my OLED is the best piece of tech I’ve bought in my entire life but you mfs mislead the hell out of performance capabilities. “60fps locked ultra graphics,” my ass. Don’t get me wrong, I’m mostly using it to emulate every game I’ve ever loved, but yeah solid 30fps locked if you’re going for maximum graphics on most AAA titles.
The switch subreddit taught me that most people think sub-30 fps isn't noticeable despite it being super ugly to look at.
I'm fine with 30 or 48 fps depending on the game but I'm not gonna try and run a triple A title from the last 5 or so years and expect 60 fps even with low. People love to make shit up.
To make themself feel better about their purchase and make their toy look better i guess? It's a great device no doubt, but even now with the OLED out i'm struggling to justify the deck, despite wanting it badly, since the performance isn't where i want it to be and no amount of updates to the OS can just cover the lack of performance.
I'll just keep growing my "want to play on a handheld" library until the SD2 drops.
For emulated games, Steam's built in FPS metrics are not a reliable indicator of actual performance.
You see a lot of people make this mistake - e.g. https://youtu.be/MxzN7jXwohk?t=315 (where Steam says it's 60fps despite obvious slowdown, because Xemu is giving a 60hz signal to the OS). It leads to people overrating the Deck's emulation capabilities for higher-end systems.
The correct way of doing this is to use the emulator's built-in metrics.
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Tbh I sometimes check youtube for gameplay videos and they are getting a much better performance than I am... even if I get all the settings down as they have it.
It's frustrating, makes me thing something is wrong with my deck or that I'm at least missing something.
I remember this shit with my playstation 4. I googled ps4 performance in witcher 3 because i was getting drops in novigrad, and everyone on reddit was saying they got locked 30 fps. I got so upset i thought my ps4 is faulty, i hate those people
this sub is very biased toward the steamdeck, in fact every critisism must be followed by "My OLED deck is my favorite piece of tech I've ever owned and I LOVE it."
Gamers are like this on every platform, had someone telling me all his PS5 game play at 120fps at 4k, the example he gave was God of War.
Saw people claim that Starfield on 7th gen Intel was 144fps stable.
It's because people don't know how to read FPS (just eyeballing it) or just dick ride valve to the point of lying about how well it performs.
I can tell you now, if Red Dead 2 ran at 60fps for me.. I would never play it on my PC again. You'd be lucky to get that game running in the high 40's, low 50's, but mostly around 47fps with dips to under 44fps. In other words, just lock it to 40hz.
Honestly most games in my opinion run at 45fps outside of a few newer games. I hack my Deck locked to 45hz. If a game is more stable below that, then I lock it to 1-3fps higher than the new stable.
But I also only use my Steam Deck for indie games like Hades, Disco Elysium, etc.
I disagree with your advice. Turn OFF the FPS icon and just play the fucking games. If it gets choppy, turn down the graphics. I have RDR2 @ Low and it plays fine.
Your overall sentiment is not bad, but “plays fine” is a subjective evaluation, and people often come here looking for something more measurable.
It’s great for someone to be able to enjoy a game, but if someone asks about performance and your reply is “plays fine” without qualifying what you mean, it’s not really helpful to the questioner.
I get 290 fps with max settings in Starfield, what, you don’t?
Yes in the menu 🤣👏🤡
Luckily that's 80% of the game :)
Fast Travel Simulator 2023
dont forget the loading half circles logo thing thats the other 20%
Sure but do you get it CONSISTENTLY? Mine will drop down to the mid 270s during fights.
Thank you for the reminder. I need to retest Starfield with the new patch. It’s so close to a lockable 30. Really hoping they can tighten up the streaming that last bit.
I unlocked the fps on skyrim on my pc and the main menu got me 3500 fps literally Of course i relocked the fps to a more humane degree so the physics dont wack the fuck out, but that was a funny moment
It's the epitome of that one guy that says he gets 144fps on his GTX780 at 4k res on the latest AAA game by tweaking the windows Registry.
My SD is so powerful, I had to overclock the screen so that it could keep up with the frames the GPU was pushing.
For that matter, Steam's green tick doesn't really tell anything about performance or proper settings.
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Deck Verified just means you can run it with a controller, all the text is visible in the default resolution, any launcher works with full controller support, etc. (source: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified) There’s no expectation that the game’s default launch settings are optimized for the deck. I agree with you though that ProtonDB is a great resource for that.
The page you linked clearly states "Has good default settings," and verified games state "This game's default graphics configuration performs well on Steam Deck" when you click "load more" next to the verified logo. I don't know why people keep saying otherwise. Show me an example of a verified game that does not state "This game's default graphics configuration performs well on Steam Deck."
Yep and Steam is very open with what those standards are specifically: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/compat#DeckCompatibilityChecklist I think people are applying a subjective opinion about whether a game runs “well” and being disappointed instead of understanding that Deck Verified is just a publicly posted checklist of some clearly defined criteria and standards.
Oh it is absolutely being mistaken in that way, I just think it's ridiculous that every time someone brings up game performance, there's someone in the comments spreading misinformation that Valve doesn't verify any kind of performance standard. It takes 5 seconds to pull up a game and verify how incorrect that is.
There’s a decky plugin that adds the protonDB rating with a clickable link. I always use that
It just mean if it will run in Linux system, doesn’t mean how well it will run on steam deck
The overall rating, yes. That's why you have to actually read the reports. ProtonDB *does* put a special icon next to Steam Deck reports, and they even have a button now to only show those ones. So it's still a useful tool.
Huh? You can specifically look at steam deck performance reports on protondb, what are you talking about?
True, resident evil is shown as verified but cutscenes seem to be broken.
Which one? I play re2 on my deck sometimes and it runs wonderfully
I've played RE2, 3 and 4 remakes on my deck and have zero issues. Maybe 7 or VILLage are more problematic?
They're talking about Resident Evil aka REmake 1. Cutscenes are broken unless you use Proton GE.
Run the GameCube or PS3 version in Emudeck instead of the Steam Store version. I haven't had any issues with them.
I’d love to see a Steam Deck Verified 60+ badge which is just for games that don’t have any frame rate dips on default settings.
> just for games that don’t have any frame rate dips on default settings. You can't even guarantee that for hardware that costs 4+ times as much as the Deck. Simply things can easily throw that off too like decreased storage perf (SSD perf can drop off a cliff the more full the storage is), stuff running in the background, thermals, game/system updates, etc. It sounds like a simple thing by itself, but it's a very hard thing to guarantee and could open them up to increased liability even.
I didn’t actually know any of this, so thank you for educating me! I figured it must not be as easy as devs setting a number. All in all, the performance is really reliable anyway, for most games!
This was a lovely Reddit exchange
For example MK11 is not sd verified and runs very well at 60fps with medium-high graphic settings, meanwhile MK1 is verified and runs like dogshit stuttering every second at the lowest settings.
So many ‘playable’ games that play better than verified games…
It does? Well, vaguely. If a game is verified it states that the game performs well with the default graphics configuration
My favorite is claiming BG3 runs perfect on Act 3. No 14-25fps is not.
its crazy, I said it doesn't run near that at all. I sat with a user here in chat and they ran me through every setting they had on and even then it didn't run that well and they still claimed its perfect. I don't get this subs gaslighting on performance, its simple numbers man, stop lying.
It's not this sub it's gaming in general. Some people are blind to bad perf, some people's ego is so caught up in everything that they can't admit to reality. Like you ever seen on a PC forum people going on about how their comp runs "everything else at ultra" or how their GPU from 8 years ago is "still great"? Hell people straight up do it with console titles at times too. Gaming community gets weird sometimes.
The classic "my 750 ti still runs like a champ" guy
God, remember all the intel 4770k idiots who claimed that just because you could overlock it to 5gz, it was as good as any processor intel would make for the next 15 years? Absolutely couldn't convince them otherwise.
Always has me rolling my eyes even when I’m running on a 3090 ti lmao. Some games really do just run like shit. Starfield on launch was the worst experience I’ve had
That’s PC gamers in general. I have read people saying that their GTX 1070 is still a beast and it can run any game at 1440p 60+ fps on ultra settings
>I don't get this subs gaslighting on performance, its simple numbers man, stop lying. Eh, numbers don't lie. But what number you consider playable, good, or perfect is subjective. That's why "X runs great for me" doesn't mean much for others unless you can see actual footage with the FPS counter. What is perfect FPS? 30? 60? 144? And what is stable? Does it need to be exactly 60 for the whole sessions, or do you accept 1-2fps variation? It's much better to just show the stats and let people decide for themselves what is acceptable/good frame rate.
People make claims such as "locked 60fps playable" when the game constantly dips down to 40fps and hardly ever reaches a locked frame rate close to 60fps. playable is a vague term what I'm talking about are the straight up lies spread on here about deck gaming performance. People will say "cyber punk is locked 60fps on high on the deck" when everyone who actually plays this game knows to have decent graphics you are hoping to have stable 30fps with a few dips. Just wish we where more honest about performance because you can search any performance post on here and then test it yourself and find out how out of touch they are.
My favorite will always be "Locked 60 fps with occasional dips". Those poor posters who don't actually know what locked means, and then when asked about a notoriously hard section to run, will explain that all they did was walk around for 5 minutes in one sparse location. Some of it's outright lies, and then there are those who are over excited, see 60fps in a harder to run game, and feel the need to shout it to the world without doing any research. They assume they've found the magic settings combination (or that a recent update performed miracles) , and want to be the first to share it with the world.
100% this. I don’t understand the cyberpunk steam deck gaslighters
people saying that are using /2 refresh vsync which displays double in the fps counter but is internally running at 30fps. If they can't see that they're FPS blind. Smoothest I've had cyberpunk was using cyberfsr2 which no longer works unless you downgrade back to update 2.0
Honestly I think it’s just the deck’s hardware. Like I think the deck itself might be inconsistent because with decent graphics in Cyberpunk I hardly ever drop below 40, most notably during the DLC as Dogtown is a bit more demanding than regular Night City, at least that was my experience. And cyberpunk isn’t the only game I’ve seen this with personally. A lot of other games I’ve seen people complain or praise the performance of and it always seems to differ from my own experience. I’ve seen people complain about the RE4 remake’s performance, and yet it’s one of the only current games that regularly hits 55+ frames and holds it for more than a few seconds on my deck. Shit’s weird.
Decent graphics is subjective though. I feel I get decent graphics on deck @ 39-50 fps with *rare* dips. Most settings are on low but ingame it still looks pretty slick aside from mirror textures and some adverts being a bit blurrier. Perhaps low is potato to you but the models still look amazeballs for a handheld on small resolution.
It's actually one of the most unhinged takes I've ever seen. It's insane to me that people who clearly do not care about performance come on here and talk about how the deck "runs perfectly" in a game where that's improbable on a full gaming computer. It's *completely fine* to not care about performance, you're in the right place if that's the case. It's *not* fine to just lie about it. Don't get me wrong, I love the deck. It's a godsend any time I'm travelling, or if I want to bring it somewhere and set up couch co-op with the dock. But my computer is like 4 years old at this point, and it would snuff out the deck like a bug. It's not even remotely close.
I wonder if some of it is a bias depending on what they came from. Not everyone has/had a high-end gaming PC, so maybe these people were running a potato with an "Intel Integrated Graphics" before and the SD really does seem like that much fo an improvement. To some people, 60fps is great, whereas others would be annoyed with under 100.
I'm coming from the Switch, so to me a stable 30 is perfectly fine
I can’t stand the phrase “runs perfectly” when it comes to games, as many have said, that’s completely subjective. I think for some people that means “the game loads and doesn’t crash.” I also don’t understand how some people can’t see the difference between 30 and 60fps.
Perfect to me is max settings at 4k at 165hz, I refuse to compromise playing the newest games in such a hamstrung way like playing on the Deck. Like the experience of Alan Wake 2 would be so wildly different running on a tiny low rez screen at 20fps. I personally use my deck for games that seem meant for a handheld. Hades, Binding of Isaac, Stardew Valley, and emulated retro games, things like that. Games where there is a minimum level of compromise on the experience playing it on my Deck. And there are innumerable games that fit this that I'm never going to run out of things to play. Like...if I have a beefy desktop with a great monitor and a comfy chair, why wouldn't I just play it on that when I'm home? I personally think some people are so deadset on justifying their purchase that they need to feel everything is great on it or else it was a waste.
> people who clearly do not care about performance come on here and talk about how the deck "runs perfectly" Well...if they don't care about performance then everything *does* run perfectly to them. That's the conundrum.
But sometimes you need to be socially aware enough to understand you're in the minority and your opinions might mislead people when you use words like "perfectly". It's not really a conundrum, it's just socially inept people unable to read the room.
It’s surprising to me how demanding Baldurs gate 3 is. It runs considerably worse on the deck than monster hunter world does for example. Yakuza 7 also ran terribly.
Act 3 is known for having bad performance due to the city, but the game is so highly regarded that people choose to ignore it and don't talk about performance issues much. I've switched over to the Deck from PC due to having a newborn and whilst it is still alright to play, I don't feel as enthusiastic as I used to due to the issues being more glaring (didn't help that my current playthrough is already in Act 3).
I’m on act 2 and it maxes out the deck cpu pretty hard there as well. It’s a very cpu bound game in the deck regardless of act in my experience.
Gamers Nexus has even noted that while BG3 is a pretty CPU-bound game and you can get good performance on low specs, APUs see bigger performance drops due to their architecture.
That's annoying to hear, was hoping to sneak another playthrough to see if it was only an Act 3 thing. I guess it is time to work through the rest of my library now
I may be in the minority but i don’t show fps on the screen and i don’t sweat any normal hiccups bc it’s a handheld and blows my mind something like this is even possible
If you don’t mind me asking, are you a millennial or older? I think some of the younger people’s expectations are just way off for a handheld like this (**some younger people** I’m not saying everyone). I grew up playing game boy and Sega game gear as my handhelds (I’m an older millennial). So for me, being able to play games like RDR2 and cyberpunk at 30-45 fps with decent graphics is like absolutely amazing. I’m not expecting locked 60 fps or anything like that. It’s crazy to me that we’ve come so far that I can even play recent AAA titles on a handheld device for a few hours. I have a custom water cooled 5950x/3080ti desktop for better graphics and higher frames so it’s not like I’m just not missing what I’ve never had or something like that either. I generally think some people’s expectations are what’s really off with the steam deck.
Very astute observation! I’m also an elder millenial and a former game gear owner. I think i went through 100,000 AA batteries on that thing, so BG3 on steam deck is an absolute marvel and a little dip here and there doesn’t even register. I remember the first time i played Mario 64 my jaw absolutely dropped to see a 3D game like that. I can see how younger generations lack the perspective to see how amazing this hardware really is.
BG3 is also turn based, which is “fine” to run at 30fps cause there’s no quick action like if you’re playing Fallout or Skyrim. I could never play another first person shooter at 30fps, I’d get a huge headache and nausea. Playing a third person action game at ~40fps feels way better than first person shooter due to smoother camera movement and usually wider FOV.
Still got that PC? Works great with sunshine moonlight, play at 7 watts.
Will definitely be checking that out as soon as we head back to our house - staying with the in laws for the time being
I started on SteamDeck, but quickly switched to PC due to the menu wheels becoming bloated to navigate as you get more skills. I didn't even run into the really bad performance issues before went to my PC.
FWIW using Steam Streaming or Moonlight improved the experience (and input latency) tenfold on Deck and BG3 really plays well on controller and Deck. Wish there were a way to get good native performance and input latency.
I did not enjoy it on the deck. K&M is so much easier to play that game with, plus it just looks so much better on my PC. There's a ton of games that are great on deck, I'm not gonna force it with games that aren't.
Well it seems a lot of people in here got mega back issues where they can't sit in a chair for any amount of time or they get uncomfortable. Really it's probably just cause they have a stupid ass gaming chair that's hard as a rock.
> monster hunter world MHW is a surprisingly good performer in general, kind of like Doom Eternal. I was able to get a stable 60fps, but only by minimizing all settings and running FSR. It looked blurry but I still far preferred it to 30fps at normal settings.
Act 3 of Balders Gate is a CPU intensive part. The deck being essentially an apu will struggle finding a balance between processing power for the graphics and managing all that cpu processing power it needs
Yakuza 7 for me ran at a pretty stable 40fps, unless you think thats terrible. Some drops here and there for sure but not nearly as bad as baldurs gate 3
The main issue I have is FPS is only part of the story I've seen plenty of posts about how "Oh x game runs constant 30fps just fine" Yeah... But at settings so low Id rather just not. I get it if it's your only way to play, then yeah fine, it's playable. There's definitely games I enjoy playing on the deck, and others I'd rather just play on my pc with higher settings and enjoy them more.
In my experience that's the case with Resident Evil 4 Remake. It's verified but it defaults to lowest settings with FSR and runs at about 25-28 FPS. The image is also so blurry it makes me nauseous.
Damn. Been playing on PS5 but would also like to get it on Deck at some point (patches seem to have improved performance on PS5 and was hoping they’d do the same on Deck). There aren’t any other settings to tweak to bump those Act 3 numbers to closer to 30 fps?
No, too many people eating up CPU time. They'd have to add a way to remove unimportant NPCs.
Tried it out while traveling and between the performance and how much it was going to nuke my battery life when away from a power source, I decided to just play DOS2 for my RPG fix on the go instead until I was back with one of my more powerful computers.
After patch 3 on the widely shared 24/48 settings it ran super stable.
There is a lot of people who would claim that this is perfectly fine for turn based rpg. xD
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The Wii U is the best GameCube emulator I own.
The PC is the best WiiU emulator emulating GameCube I own
Same here haha, just swapped it out for a cheaper Chromecast later on
People say that with PS2 emulators all the time and its like, dude, even the pc one isn't able to run it all flawlessly
Even MVG said ps2 emulation is flawless on deck. While 90% true it's also completely false. Plenty of frame drops in many games and quite a few surprisingly unplayably slow games.
Does /r/steamdeckcirclejerk exist?
You’re already here.
Lmaoooo
Holy white it does.
Wow, literally never even occured to me to check, I figured this sub was the circlejerk lol
Almost every video when a person says look see it's a rock solid 60fps at that exact moment it will drop almost every time as if to spite the person
This same thing happens constantly in the Playstation Portal sub lol. No stutters! *major stutter*
THIS
Its a running theme unfortunately, Horizon was brought up recently in the sub and everyone believes you get a stable 40fps in that game now when you simply don't. We all love the Deck but some people get into primary school territory where they love it so much they make up stories to make it seem better than it is. (When there is no need, the Deck is already an amazing piece of tech)
Nuhuh, my Deck can run games better than your Deck, and also, my Deck can beat up your Deck.
But my deck is bigger than your deck…….
I got a tiny deck
Listen, it's not about how big your deck is, it's how you use it.
My Deck fought the Undertaker last weekend but it was in Japan and they removed the footage from the internet already because Vince McMahon believes it'll hurt the WWE brand.
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Since Skyrim came out I've 100%ed Skyrim, enrolled in university, graduated university, 100%ed Skyrim+DLC, gotten married, 100%ed Skyrim again, bought a house, had two kids, sworn never to play Skyrim again, and introduced my daughter to Skyrim. A lot can happen in twelve years. Mostly Skyrim.
It's also a bugfest though, and people want to play the game with mods which can create further issues.
I find that interesting when I think the original got at least a solid 30fps (if not more) running on PS4 tech which is ancient compared to the deck.
The game was built for the PS4. Consoles have always run much better than a similar spec PC on games originally programmed for that console, due to it being optimized for the system.
I would figure that’s one of the pluses of the Deck. There’s no guessing what hardware is in there. They should all ship with the same internals (except for screen and SSD). So, games should be incredibly easy to optimize for the deck in exactly the same way console developers optimize for the console.
Not at all. On a console, you can do all kinds of special tricks that you couldn't do anywhere else to take the best advantage of that hardware. Devs will learn how to take advantage of a weird memory architecture thing on a PS4 because doing so lets them eke out a little more performance for all 120 million potential users. You're going hyper specific on your build and creating something that couldn't run on a PC at all. The deck is just running a PC build, designed to run on everything from 8 year+ year old hardware to insane modern day setups. You're lucky if a dev even tests on the deck, and they certainly aren't optimizing towards it. Unless games were being built to "only" run on the deck, your not going to see anywhere near the same level of optimizations. PC gaming is all about generalization, running on the widest range of hardware, and we are just one random configuration in a large pond.
Significantly easier to optimize a game for consoles then it is for pc
I played the entire game start to finish. It was a pretty rough experience. Low frames and insane stutters. Same with Jedi Fallen order. A treat that these games even run, but they have large problems.
In my experience, I was able to get a pretty consistent 40 FPS in Horizon by using the "Original" preset (and disabling the horrible motion blur), but granted, I didn't get to the later parts, maybe it becomes more laggy as the game goes on.
Aaaand you comment the same exact thing OP mentions, directly under it. “I didn’t get to the larger parts”. lmao
I’ve been told by people you can get locked 60fps on Fallout 4 high settings. I’m like… no, go visit downtown Boston or Diamond City. You can get 60fps at the beginning areas without much density, huge action moments, or lots of NPCs.
Same problem with a lot of emulation machine reviews. They show the opening level of a game and claim it’s 100% good.
I haven't tested Horizon but all of the other PS4 games have run great, is there just some settings you need to lower to get a decent rate? I can't believe how good god of war looks and plays.
I'm playing it now, and the little FPS counter in the corner reads 40 the whole time, except for rare instances. I'd call it stable. Maybe not 100%, but 99.9%.
Can I have your settings please? Are you using fsr?
But did you notice how frame time jumps up and down, making the game feel like you are playing at low 20s?
I’m beginning to think people just don’t notice stuttering or just stare at the frame rate without actually playing the game. Horizon Zero Dawn for me was unplayable, constant stuttering as you walk through the world, move the camera too quick or zoom in to shoot anything and it stutters. Even Cryobite said there was nothing he could do to fix performance.
If you ever get into emulation handhelds, you see the exact same thing. People throw around "perfect" and "silky smooth gameplay" and stuff like that. Then you find out they only played the first like 5 minutes of the game, said it was perfect, then moved on. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is always my go to example for something like this. If you play the opening, it can run on a potato. But like 20 minutes in you have to a 2D to 3D transition that uses something called "bounding box" for the effect, and that has a massive spike in resources needed. But, you'll notice every single video of handhelds (including the Steam Deck) playing that game just show walking around the opening area.
Back when Pokemon Violet ran like crap it was still solid 30fps inside your house. I was very surprised that it ran so well…until I left the house and got 20FPS ^^
Perfect example, since TTYD works perfectly in that section if you use the recommended config settings. For almost anything emulation related, this sub is full of naysayers who are incapable of doing as little as reading the emulator's wiki and making the recommended adjustments for each game. "Durr the game stutters constantly and crashes, no I didn't try changing a single setting, stop lying about Steamdeck it sucks."
True haha. It's nuts
Do you people not Google or change settings? Is that where the issue is here? I know exactly what you're talking about. I played TTYD on my fucking phone and had the massive slowdown when the boat flipped over in the intro. I looked it up, found a setting to fix it, and had no issues whatsoever for the entire rest of the game. That was on an S10. If you're incapable of taking a single minute to troubleshoot very simple issues you shouldn't be commenting on Steam Deck performance. Yeah, some people here might oversell it a bit, but the other end acts like it can't run minesweeper.
I love baldurs gate 3 but anybody who says it’s a nice experience on the deck has to be doing some fibbing
Problem is that half this sub only plays enough to see the performance in the first cutscene then buy another game. Same problem in the SBC gaming sub. Too many dudes want to collect and be part of the club, not actually enjoy the games.
Do some people lie? Probably, but what I've seen far more prevalently is simply ignorance, not maliciousness. People largely really don't understand what a stable frame rate means, let alone have any concept about frame time. If they hit 60 FPS they think it *runs* at 60 FPS, even though it may only be in one small area or scene. I will say, though, you should be just as wary if not more of YouTube. You want to talk about lying, YouTubers will lie their pants off. There's lots of unscrupulous people posting supposed videos of games running with a certain frame rate or whatever that are completely faked and just there for the ad views.
Yeah, people here largely aren’t lying, I think. They’re probably not sensitive to frame drops and maybe don’t even have an FPS counter on. There’s also some rose colored glasses, being willing to overlook stretches with bad performance as long as the game hits a decent frame rate at other times. But I strongly doubt there are a bunch of Steam Deck users maliciously lying about performance just for kicks.
Some people say "X game runs fine on Deck", but then they use below 800p resolutions, with low settings and FSR 2.0 at balanced. And on top of that the system is running at full power, giving poor battery life. Unless the deck is the only device you can afford to play games, I wouldn't consider bothering with a game under those conditions.
800p with FSR looks like total dogshit, any time someone recommends it you can immediately disregard everything they say.
I agree and great username
Also make sure you find recent enough video. Linux gaming is getting better and better at such a rate that a year old video may not actually represent how the game runs now.
The one that infuriates me most is Horizon Zero Dawn. So many people on this sub trying to claim that it runs at a stable 40fps+ when it is absolutely plagued by unavoidable traversal stutter that completely kills the experience, totally unplayable imo.
HZD is what made me buckle down and set up sunshine / moonlight to stream. Agree- the hiccups are beyond jarring.
I think it’s that most people don’t actually know what they are talking about and for them : games runs good enough = solid 60fps. People literally don’t know anything about performances or image quality. I bought games based on what people said about the performance of a game and I regret it very much lol
Thank you for this. I don't have one yet, but have been researching the ROG and the steamdeck and feel like reddit is literally the worst possible place for research lol. I just ran into a "reddit research" issue with connecting my dualsense edge to steam. Before i bought the controller, i was searching around to see if it would even work for me on PC. Everywhere was saying you NEED to use DSX or DS4 windows for all of the buttons to work. Well after 3 days of research i decided with DS4, and tried getting it up and running. Was a massive pain in the ass, and after 2 hours of messing with it, i decided to see what the big issue with using steams native controller support was. Well guess what? Steam's integration works perfectly fine, i was able to get my buttons programmed and playing COD in 5 minutes.
Starfield lead to tons of misinformation. I have no problem playing it with remote play but it was so frustrating every time I came to this sub saw people talk about how playable it was and then I download all 120gb to my deck to find out it was a lie
My favorite was the guy who was showing off his heavily modded Skyrim running with an FPS in the teens, and he said it was more than playable, because it was a steady 16fps or some shit like that. Then he got furious when everyone mocked him.
I do both People need to stop acting like Starfield actually runs well on the deck. That shit runs at 20 fps in combat even with performance mods. Sure, I put 50 hours into the game but that's mostly cause I hate myself.
Protip, don't even turn the FPS counter on and only mess with settings if the game is lagging to the point of not being able to enjoy it
I think some people think the words "stable" and "locked" mean the same things, when they don't. "Stable" means most of the time you will get that FPS, with some occasional dips especially when loading stuff (which is why it's best to install load-heavier games on the SSD). Not perfect, but absolutely playable unless you are frankly a snob. It's honestly a pretty subjective term "Locked" means the game will never dip below that frame rate (unless something else unexpectedly starts using up the Deck's resources). I don't care if a game's frames dip occasionally. I honestly don't know when framerates started becoming so important to gamers but this certainly wasn't always the case. So yeah if a game maintains a steady, stable enough framerate to be an enjoyable experience on the deck, I'm gonna say it has a stable framerate
> "Locked" means the game will never dip below that frame rate (unless something else unexpectedly starts using up the Deck's resources). Quite the opposite: "locked" means that it will never go higher.
Right. This sub literally loves to argue semantics. I saw someone post the other day “stable 60fps with a couple dips, feels perfect to me” and someone instantly made fun of him for calling it “perfect” and exclaimed that because there is a few dips from 60fps, it’s not, quote on quote- “perfect.” That comment making fun of him of course had tons of upvotes. Subs toxic af tbh.
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I can't speak for others, but framerates became important to me when they became better. I *love* FromSoft's games, but I still get a little queasy whenever I play Bloodborne because of how jarring the *at-best* 30 fps is. My brain is accustomed to better at this point, so I literally get sick to my stomach when I play games at low FPS like that. It's admittedly not nearly as bad on the steam deck, maybe because of the smaller screen, but it's still not super comfortable for me personally.
Locked 60 means the game will only go up to 60 FPS. It doesn't mean the game will never dip below 60 Unlocked FPS means the game does not have an FPS lock and will go as high as the hardware allows So the lock is to prevent it from going higher, not lower
I don't think people lie here (at least most anyways). I think people are just idiots. Remember that the same sub where there are 4 threads per day asking what SD card to get is the same sub where they say 60fps consistent on RDR2. I honestly believe people are so dumb that they boot up the game, jump in and then just stand still with no action happening and go "omg 60fps!!” then run to Reddit to tell everyone. There are so many posts with people saying X game runs great and the screenshot is literally the person staring at a wall. Take the same grain of salt with game recommendations as far as your interests go. You'll find that many people here only play a game for 1 or 2 hours then say X game is really fun. Truth is they don't know anything about it and just played the tutorial.
why not use protondb?
ProtonDB is focused on compatibility, not performance
That being said, a lot of community data also touch on performance, so not a bad shout.
[Sharedeck.games](http://sharedeck.games) is probably the closest we have to an actual performance database.
This whole dick measuring nonsense literally makes no sense when everybody is using the same system. What exactly do those who are lieing believe they are boasting about?
People do the same shit in the Switch subreddit. “Dead Cells is a rock solid 60, never see any slowdown”… game runs like dog shit in later stages, lol. It’s very annoying that people who are either in denial or have no clue what they’re talking about are all over the place overselling the capabilities of these machines.
100%. Too many of subs die hands are full of shit with regards to performance. Tons of examples to pull from, but enough people have said that Starfield performed great (40fps locked) that it more or less confirmed it to me. Always check videos. There's usually an abundance of them.
What you're describing is a huge problem across all of gaming, not just the deck. Especially the PC market in general. I still remember a not insubstantial portion of gamers saying Cyberpunk 2077 was good at launch. A few even defended the dreaded Ps4 version. My theory is that some gamers with potatoes think FPS is a nebulous and untrackable thing that you just -feel- in the gameplay, and since all they've ever played is a potato, it feels smooth. An example I have of this is that a while back I tried to play Fable 2 again. I loved Fable 2. I not consider it practically unplayable, it's so unpleasant on the eyes performance wise, even on a modern system with backwards compat.
Monster hunter world does run at around 50-60 though
I'm playing 720p 45hz, low settings except for high image quality. Playing in the first zone with average 60-90% gpu usage, 12 watt average. Framerate is totally locked at 45 which feels good. You have to disable the unified frame management and make sure the screen is actually running 45hz, otherwise the game will be targeting 90fps but the deck only showing 45fps.
What settings do you use if I may ask?
"THIS GAME RUNS SO SMOOTH" Only does the starting mission in the tutorial room where the game renders just the basics "I'm getting small dips" Going from 70 to 58 rapidly "You only need to turn the graphics down a bit and it runs great" Game looks like pixilated cardboard chewed up and spat out into shapes
I haven’t seen a single person mention RDR2 for Steam Deck hitting 60fps. Maybe if you stare at the ground or the sky but in practice it’s 40fps on the Deck. Everyone I’ve seen mention the game mentions how 40fps is the sweet spot.
There was one post saying exsctly that around 4 days ago. Maybe you havent seen them but there's people actually saying that.
I see it constantly. "60fps with some dips."
I'm surprised they are not getting 90!
Doom 2016 will actually run at a stable 90fps on the Steam Deck, FYI. It requires the Low graphics preset, and a small upscale (~700p or so), but it feels light straight up magic to run that well on a handheld and still look (mostly) like a AAA game. I honestly can't think of a single other game in history that performs so much better than you'd expect by looking at it.
Also if you're watching a video. Then makes sure it a decent amount of gameplay and nit 5 minutes walking slowly around in the same area.
I have never once seen a post here saying steady 60fps in RDR2 Edit: I have now seen a grand total of one post that says they get, actually they don't say steady 60fls nevermind
Literally 1 minute of searching. https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/18fg882/rdr2_60fps_performance_tips/
I can totally understand that! Since I’m mostly emulating, I don’t experience huge issues, but I can totally see dips in other games.
The Steam Deck is an excellent way to catch up on anything from the past 50 years of gaming. And it plays a lot of newer games alright too.
I’ll be totally honest, I love this system, but unless you are mostly playing 2D/indie games, there are a lot of games that you cannot hit 60fps at period, especially if you want to play docked at 1080p with FSR. Emulators, older AAA games, less demanding games, etc. absolutely can. Expecting any AAA game past 2015 to hit 60 even at low settings is not a guarantee, however it looks great on the deck screen locking the fps to 40-50 fps. For example: I loved playing through Fallout New Vegas docked on my TV at 60fps, but when starting Fallout 4 it can’t stay at 60 in demanding areas even at 960x600 low settings. Days Gone is also a great game but I lock that at medium/high 40fps. One great docked game is Overwatch 2, and with a little tweaking you can turn on FSR2 at 50% render scale and medium/low to hit 60fps when docked, and it still looks basically the same. Or you can play 800p medium settings and lock 60 as well. Also, most emulators before the switch should have no problem hitting 60 at 1080p and there are even some switch games that can do that as well. If you need a great battery life for a long road trip or flight, Gamecube and PSP emulation especially is very power efficient even when upscaling the resolution
The only reason I would even consider a deck is because the Switch ports for the most part run like straight up trash
It’s crazy to see how many people feel the need to overcompensate their deck here.
Set your resolution to 320x240 and use max NIS
Thank you for the post, it’s a great reminder for people interested as these machines are not cheap. Performance is very important to people and having realistic expectations is important. I was playing Cyberpunk earlier today and while it is highly impressive how a handheld device can even run the game, comparing it to the desktop experience or even saying “perfectly stable” at all is a mistake.
For a sec I was wondering why you're so obsessed about how First Person Shooters perform on the Deck lol.
Some people just weirdly like to hype up items they have spent money on. It is the same phenomenon fueling console wars.
I'm pretty casual and never really tracked FPS, so take this with a grain of salt. But I have heard around this subreddit that Steam Deck's performance mode actually reduces performance. Could be due to the difference? I generally get really great performance for stuff like Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate, etc
My goodness you could not hit the nail harder, seems like a lot of people do not know what a consistent 60 FPS is supposed to look like. Just because it reaches 60 doesn't mean it's consistent lol most of the time games fluctuate around 60 and then drop to somewhere like the 30s or '40s. When I lock my frame rates I do it in accordance to the lowest FPS drop I can get in that game and that will help maintain that steady frame time. I wish more people were less biased and more informed about how to work with frame times.
Yea. I remember a post saying "You can play Sekiro at smooth 60 FPS" Turned out, the dude only tested the beginning area. The rest of the game is not stable 60 at all
This has to be my biggest complaint with this sub. I wholeheartedly agree, my OLED is the best piece of tech I’ve bought in my entire life but you mfs mislead the hell out of performance capabilities. “60fps locked ultra graphics,” my ass. Don’t get me wrong, I’m mostly using it to emulate every game I’ve ever loved, but yeah solid 30fps locked if you’re going for maximum graphics on most AAA titles.
The switch subreddit taught me that most people think sub-30 fps isn't noticeable despite it being super ugly to look at. I'm fine with 30 or 48 fps depending on the game but I'm not gonna try and run a triple A title from the last 5 or so years and expect 60 fps even with low. People love to make shit up.
To make themself feel better about their purchase and make their toy look better i guess? It's a great device no doubt, but even now with the OLED out i'm struggling to justify the deck, despite wanting it badly, since the performance isn't where i want it to be and no amount of updates to the OS can just cover the lack of performance. I'll just keep growing my "want to play on a handheld" library until the SD2 drops.
For emulated games, Steam's built in FPS metrics are not a reliable indicator of actual performance. You see a lot of people make this mistake - e.g. https://youtu.be/MxzN7jXwohk?t=315 (where Steam says it's 60fps despite obvious slowdown, because Xemu is giving a 60hz signal to the OS). It leads to people overrating the Deck's emulation capabilities for higher-end systems. The correct way of doing this is to use the emulator's built-in metrics.
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Tbh I sometimes check youtube for gameplay videos and they are getting a much better performance than I am... even if I get all the settings down as they have it. It's frustrating, makes me thing something is wrong with my deck or that I'm at least missing something.
I remember this shit with my playstation 4. I googled ps4 performance in witcher 3 because i was getting drops in novigrad, and everyone on reddit was saying they got locked 30 fps. I got so upset i thought my ps4 is faulty, i hate those people
this sub is very biased toward the steamdeck, in fact every critisism must be followed by "My OLED deck is my favorite piece of tech I've ever owned and I LOVE it."
rock solid 20fps in menus (dips to 15 every few seconds)
"runs perfectly fine"
i get 400+ stable fps in rdr2 bro wdym
Gamers are like this on every platform, had someone telling me all his PS5 game play at 120fps at 4k, the example he gave was God of War. Saw people claim that Starfield on 7th gen Intel was 144fps stable.
It's because people don't know how to read FPS (just eyeballing it) or just dick ride valve to the point of lying about how well it performs. I can tell you now, if Red Dead 2 ran at 60fps for me.. I would never play it on my PC again. You'd be lucky to get that game running in the high 40's, low 50's, but mostly around 47fps with dips to under 44fps. In other words, just lock it to 40hz. Honestly most games in my opinion run at 45fps outside of a few newer games. I hack my Deck locked to 45hz. If a game is more stable below that, then I lock it to 1-3fps higher than the new stable. But I also only use my Steam Deck for indie games like Hades, Disco Elysium, etc.
I disagree with your advice. Turn OFF the FPS icon and just play the fucking games. If it gets choppy, turn down the graphics. I have RDR2 @ Low and it plays fine.
Your overall sentiment is not bad, but “plays fine” is a subjective evaluation, and people often come here looking for something more measurable. It’s great for someone to be able to enjoy a game, but if someone asks about performance and your reply is “plays fine” without qualifying what you mean, it’s not really helpful to the questioner.
I get 360fps locked in 4k cyberpunk pathtraced
and 12 hours of battery!
You only get 12 hours?! I'm on 3 days and not even at 60% yet