God of War (2018) is the first game in the rebooted-ish God of War series. You play as angry man Kratos who, with his son Atreus, must honor his partner’s dying wish. Along the way, you will travel across the land, encountering the gods of the norse mythology, all while training his son to be an angry boy. This game detracts from its predecessors heavily, focusing on telling a compelling story in a third person view over a beat-em-up style game. The game is phenomenal all around and is easily one of the greatest games to have ever been made. Saying this was a worthwhile experience is an understatement, so I was praying this would run well on the Steam Deck.
Knowing how this would turn out, I started my benchmarking with everything set to max. Lo and behold, it was horrible. Everything set to max with native resolution and no caps resulted in a 20 FPS average with a 24W+ battery drain and temps that were rising up to the high 80s. And this was in one of the less heavy areas of the game. I had no intention of using max settings though and here is where the review gets a bit tricky.
While God of War looks beautiful, battery drain and temps are high, as well as the framerate hanging around 20 FPS or lower.
God of War is a super intensive game and I feel there are two ways to play this: 30 FPS with a battery/quality focus and 40 FPS with a performance focus. In my testing, having a specific quality-focus build results in battery drain that hits a bit too hard, though it is possible to play.
Seeing as how draining God of War is, I wanted to see how far I could get the drain and temps down while keeping a stable 30. Thankfully, God of War does have FSR 2.0 integration, so I didn’t have to turn the resolution down as much to save battery. I set the TDP to 9 and started reducing some quality settings to make sure the stable framerate was hit. I ended up with a nice mix of original and high settings, with 3 of them being low. With those settings and a 1152x720 resolution with FSR 2.0 set to quality, we get a fairly nice picture with a mostly stable 30 FPS. There are some framerate spikes, but I don’t feel they are noticeable in general play without the graph there. I have seen some minor slowdowns too, but these tend to happen in cutscenes or entering new areas, which don’t impact gameplay as much. Turning up TDP could mitigate some of these, but will also drain everything much faster. Even when all the settings are set to low, I still experienced some form of spike, so while these settings may cause a little more, they still don’t feel noticeable and give more to the game while saving a significant amount of battery drain.
When it comes to 40 FPS, it is possible to achieve it while still looking quite good, though at a cost to stability. I would say overall, the game is 80% stable at 40 with these settings, though there are still mini spikes which are much more noticeable due to the increased framerate. On top of that, battery drains significantly more and temps get up to 80c, which in itself is still not that bad. It is also slightly blurrier as the resolution is changed down to 960x600, and FSR 2.0 set to balanced, but the smooth framerate does make up for this. It is still decent looking, though personally, the upgrades to quality and less noticeable spikes win out for me.
The difference in quality is clear and while 40 FPS can be hit, the temps and battery drain are massive.
There were no clear differences when using a different Proton version for God of War, so you can pick and choose which one you would like to use. I prefer using Proton GE when I can. If you don't know about it or want to install, you can follow our guide for it!
I did also encounter a couple bugs with the Deck. I noticed that after some cutscenes in God of War, my controls would stop working. This was easily fixed by hitting the "Steam" button and then going back into the game, but it was a bit annoying to deal with. I also did notice that moving the left analog stick has a very slight delay. I tested to see if this was due to SteamOS's cap, though even when Vsync in game was on with no cap, there was still that delay. It wasn't really noticeable when getting into the game though, just when I specifically stopped to test it.
I still am in shock as I tested and wrote this review, I was playing God of War on a handheld device. This game is so good and I was pleased with the performance. Of course, in terms of technicality, it could be better. It does still have framerate spikes and some bugs, but overall, this is a huge AAA game that has no business running as well as it does on Deck. If you haven't played the game before, or on the fence about it, do yourself a favor and grab the game. The compromises are well worth it.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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God of War is an insanely good game and while there are compromises to play on Deck, they are well worth it.
No Forced Compatibility
Output Resolution: 1152x720
AMD FSR: Quality
FSR Sharpening 0.3
Texture Quality: Low
Model Quality: High
Anisotropic Filter: Min
Shadows: Original
Reflections: Original
Atmospherics: Low
Ambient Occlusion: Original
SteamOS:
40 FPS Cap with 40 Refresh Rate
Half Rate Shading OFF
TDP Limit OFF
FSR Sharpness 1
Proton Version:
No Forced Compatibility
Game Settings:
Output Resolution: 960x600
AMD FSR: Balanced
FSR Sharpening 0.3
Texture Quality: Low
Model Quality: High
Anisotropic Filter: Min
Shadows: Low
Reflections: Disabled
Atmospherics: Low
Ambient Occlusion: Disabled
Projected Battery Usage/Temps:
17W - 19W with spikes to 20+
Around 75c - 80c temps for CPU and GPU
Around 1.5 hours of gameplay
Hi. Just purchased and installed God of War on my steamdeck as my 2023 winter sale purchase. And I love it so much!!
I did: 40fps, low profile graphics, 720p resolution, fsr enabled.
I can play the game for a few minutes (~15mins), then steam deck crashes, that I have to force reboot.
I'm thinking of trying these settings, in the hopes that this will solve the crashing issue.
As of now, the work-around I use to prolong gameplay and avoid the crash is to monitor my RAM usage. When about 13.5 is reached, I change quickly change graphic profile to any profile and back to low. This causes RAM to drop around 12GB, and did not crash my steamdeck.
I have also tried letting it each 14GB RAM, and the steam deck freezes.
Hello, I recently bought a steamdeck. Hooray! and I thought of installing Gow. I had problems where after installing epic from nonsteam launcher, launching the game would at times cause the game to crash/stop working in general.even after playing just for a minute would cause the game to freeze, crash and render the entire device unusable. Is there any reasons as to why that is?
Also thank you for the settings recommendation. Ill check if it makes a difference.
Gentlemen, what does HRS - (what is the expansion of the abbreviation) mean in SteamOS settings? I'm new to Steam Deck and I don't want to miss out on any of your recommended options for graphics settings.
Hi Adam! HRS stands for Half-Rate Shading. It halves the quality of the shading to save on power and performance. Generally we keep this off because it doesn’t help as much as it hurts, but we have a few cases where it helps significantly.
Welcome to the Deck family though! Feel free to ask us any questions, we are more than happy to answer and help.
I've set the 30 fps limit in gamescope then saved per game settings. However everytime I start GoW it seems to default to game settings fps and runs at 40+
I will re-download GoW and look into this. I don't recall running into any issues like that during my testing.
How do you set the in game graphics? I get low, original, and high only options without being able to set any of the individual settings below.
Unless something was updated, there should be more specific settings. I will redownload the game and get back to you on it.
Far better 40fps settings:
Display mode Borderless
Motion Blur: 0
Film Grain: 0
AMD FSR 2.0: Balanced
FSR Sharpening: 1.0
Texture: Original
Model: Original
Anisotropic Filter: Original
Shadows: Low
Reflections: Original
Atmospherics: Low
Ambient Occlusion: Original
Will check these out and compare! What is the battery drain you get?
Thank you. so much for this. Game quality dramatically improved. Appreciate this.
Hello, I've really appreciate the time you put in to test the optimal settings. It works flawlessly and stable. I shoot for your optimized 30fps version but my deck consumes 17-18W power with that and heats up to 70-75C. How can I reach 14-15W threshold with less then 70C?
I use exactly the same settings above. I didn't modified SteamOS, nor running anything at the background.
Thanks forward your guesses 🙂
Best wishes,
Iknes
Thank you so much for this! I played for 10 hours with default settings and while the experience was good, after trying out these settings everything worked even better! I have more battery. It looks great and the fan does not kick in as much!
I am so happy to hear that! God of War is a huge game and the fact that it runs at all is incredible! It makes me glad that we can help it run even better 🙂
hi there, nice work you did here
i may ask you a question,
when you use 30FPS limit, why refresh rate stills at 60 FPS?
Thank you! The reason is that the Steam Deck's refresh rate can't go down to 30hz. So the only way to cap at 30 is to have a refresh rate of 60 and then use the FPS limiter to cut in half!
Thanks for clarifying, keep up the good work also!
Of course! Always happy to help and answer any questions you have. Thank you!
Thanks for the review
I don’t really understand why you’re doubling up on FSR here?
Also surely the deck has enough VRAM to run at higher texture quality.
I tried the settings out and while they look good I don't really understand the choices, you can run at 720p with original settings with a near locked 30fps. It seems to me any sort of FSR in this game causes constant frametime spikes.
Hi there and thank you for taking the time to try out our settings!
The Deck has the capability of running the higher texture quality and at native res with original settings, but we also try to mitigate temps and battery drain with the settings we provide. And with the GPU Clock Speed Frequency being set, it tends to alleviate most of those spikes. We will be providing full quality-only builds for those that don't care much for battery drain, but that's why I made the choices I did! In this case, I did find the doubling up did help a bit with the game's overall quality and allowed me to keep settings lower so we could maximize battery life!
Did you also tried to switch to Vulkan by using https://www.nexusmods.com/godofwar/mods/37?tab=description&BH=1 ? since i have installed the mod i have a mostly stable FPS rate.
I have not tried this myself, but will and see if it is improved!