Dune: Awakening Is Now Steam Deck "Verified", But it's Still Unplayable

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Dune: Awakening can be a pretty tough game to run, and at launch, it was pretty rough on the Steam Deck. Just pottering around your base or doing the starting quests was just fine, but the moment you got to larger bases with pentashields, the Steam Deck's GPU just couldn't handle the stress anymore, as we highlighted in our review. But recently, the game has received a "Verified" rating by Valve, so has the situation improved? Let's take a look.

The short answer is yes, it has perhaps improved in some areas, and we can maintain 30 FPS in quieter areas of the game and most interiors. The long answer is no, while Dune: Awakening has seen some slight improvements in performance, the game still suffers slowdowns to a point where the game is unplayable, and even the areas that are 30 FPS aren't exactly smooth either.

I would hazard a guess that Valve is simply playing the early portions of the game and slapping a "Verified" badge on here, without actually getting to Dune's endgame, where it's at its most intense as far as system resources go.

I have a fairly large base, next to 2 other large bases, and in this area, you can expect frequent drops below 20 FPS on the Steam Deck, as well as frequent stutters, likely due to the VRAM usage exceeding 4GB, resulting in a truly unplayable experience. Dune: Awakening's combat is largely based around timing, and you absolutely do not want an unstable framerate or stuttering to be part of the process. I wouldn't even do PvE with how it is right now, let alone PvP, which is the entire focus of Dune's endgame.

As you can see from the frametime graph in the screenshots where I am in combat, although the game is largely sticking to 30 FPS, it's still an erratic graph, resulting in some stuttering and inconsistency, which isn't ideal.

Not to mention that the game requires us to run in "Ultra Performance" or "Performance" upscaling presets, meaning the image quality is pretty bad, too.

It is a shame, I was truly hoping that Funcom had managed to get Dune: Awakening working well on the Steam Deck, but that seems like it's a far cry from happening. I personally would hesitate to even give the game the "Playable" rating for Steam Deck right now, Unsupported could well be the correct rating if the entire game is supposed to be playable.

If you solely use your Steam Deck to play games, then please do not buy Dune: Awakening to play on your Steam Deck. It's a great game, and I've logged over 70 hours in it myself, but it just isn't a good time on our little handheld.

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