Update 9/13/22: After speaking with the developer behind the Hephaistos mod, and after reading, they have clarified and rewrote the instructions on how to get the mod working. We included a small guide on how to get it working so you can utilize a full 1280x800 resolution.

Hades is...well for lack of any other term...an incredible game. As the son of Hades himself, you have decided to defy your destiny and escape hell. Using an assortment of powers and weapons, you will hack and slash your way across gorgeous landscapes while upgrading your skills and powers. As this is a roguelike game, each death makes you more powerful with new weapons to unlock and permanent upgrades that carry with you throughout your deaths. Paired with an immersive fully voice-acted story, this roguelike game is an essential to everyone's library. And it just so happens that Hades is also an essential game for your Steam Deck.

Hades Performance

Due to the art style, Hades is nowhere near intensive in the slightest. When opening the game for the first time, it will boot up at a solid 60 FPS with only 12W battery drain and sub 70c temps. If you ask me, this is pretty fantastic, though we can make it better! The game tends to drain a bit extra power than it really needs, so by just setting a TDP limit to 4 and GPU Clock Speed Frequency to 1100, we can dramatically lower the drain to 8.5W - 9W with sub 60c temps.

With no visual or stability difference, you can clearly see the temps and battery drain go down significantly with slight TDP changes.

This tends to bring the battery life up to 5.5 - 6 hours from 3.5 - 4 hours with no sacrifices to performance at all. This is especially helpful if you are going to be traveling, but even just playing at home, this can help significantly. Keeping temps down will increase the longevity of your Deck's hardware as it won't be getting so hot. And honestly, with a small tweak like that and no reduction in quality or performance, there really is no reason NOT to.

Resolution Oddity

Now if I had to point out one thing, it is the resolution options. In-game, it says it supports 1280x800, but it actually only displays 1280x720 as you can see from the black bars at the top and bottom in the screenshots. While there is a way to patch this using the Hephaistos patch, it doesn't really feel necessary. The game runs and looks beautiful and I felt no reason to change the resolution. I did try to use the mod itself, but the file wouldn't execute so I couldn't patch the game. I will continue trying though and update this review if necessary.

After speaking with the developers behind the Hephaistos mod, we got it up and running. To do this, you will have to download the hephaistos-linux.zip from the release page. Then, extract the file and put it in the directory of where Hades is installed (you can access it by going to properties > local files > "Browse Local Files". Once the file is placed in the directory, right click it and select "Run in Konsole". Then, press "1" 3 times, which will patch the game to the 1280x800 native resolution on the Deck! We noticed no performance difference with the native res.

Conclusion

There really isn't much more I can say about Hades other than it is one of the best games I have ever played. The artwork, gameplay loop, the fine-tuning, they all work together in such harmony that it is hard to look back and not love it. Supergiant Games outdid themselves and it makes me incredibly happy to know how amazing this game works on Deck. If you haven't yet, buy this game.

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Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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I have always been a big fan of Cyberpunk settings. I love the futuristic, technology heavy setting that encompasses a gritty future we could one day have. Now put that setting into a co-op friendly Action RPG that runs well on the Steam Deck and I am a happy camper, and let me tell you, I am pretty damn happy. With the ability to customize your character with cyberware, skillpoints, and even clothing, this explosive shooter is way too much fun to play.

There are some good and bad points when playing on the Deck, but I would say overall, it was more positive than negative. The good is the game has Cloud Save support (thank god) AND Accessibility options that include text resizing! This is especially important on the Steam Deck due to its smaller screen.

The Ascent itself also runs well in the first 2 hours I played, though there were a couple spots I noticed major dips. Luckily, this only happened once or twice and in all combat scenarios, it held a solid 40 FPS (some explosions caused minor dips that recovered immediately). The game is made with UE4, which does mean you will see dips when loading into new places, though this recovered immediately as well. I did also notice some minor ghosting, though because the camera is so far away most of the time, I didn't feel it impacted gameplay much. I will also make note that I did not crash once when playing the game. I am aware of others who report it, so if your game is crashing, please leave a comment so we can investigate!

The Ascent is also the first game that I felt Half-Rate Shading made a big difference in framerate stability, but didn't change visuals as much. Overall, from this first look, I would say The Ascent will be good to play on Deck!

Screenshots:

Comparisons:

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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A big thank you to Deckverse for working with us on the Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered review. You can check out his YouTube Deep Dive video below. Anything not under a "SDHQ" header is written by Deckverse.

There’s a reason why Marvel’s Spider-Man from Insomniac Games is considered as one of the best superhero games of all time. It’s an amazing combination of perhaps the most fun way to move around in a game world, a great story, and the brilliant and captivating soundtrack by John Paesano. Of course, you can criticize its Ubisoft-style watchtowers, unnecessary mini-games, quicktime events as well as repetitive side quests... yet in the end Marvel's Spider-Man is a great overall package.

My name is Timo and this is a Deckverse Deep Dive into Marvel's Spiderman Remastered! It has finally been released on PC and although it does indeed look great on a beefy GPU and big screens, it begs the question: how good does it run on the Steam Deck?

Marvel's Spider-Man: Default Settings

Upon first launch on the Steam Deck, the game resorts to medium settings by default: full screen, upscaling through AMD FSR 2.0 and a dynamic resolution with a frame rate target of 30 FPS. Everything else uses the Medium preset, except Depth of Field, which is on high and Shadow Quality, which is on low. With everything uncapped, this can lead to gigantic drain of 25W with temps going...much higher than they should.

While it can reach 60 FPS, it won't stay there for long and completely overheats the Deck while pushing battery drain to the maximum possible.

Spiderman: Near Perfect 30 FPS

Nixxes Software, who are responsible for the port to the PC, seem to aim for a frame rate target of 30 FPS here, which can successfully be maintained by the Steam Deck in most cases. Only very rarely does the performance drop to around 25FPS for a few seconds, but due to the lack of an in-engine framerate cap there is a constant fluctuation upwards, which results in a very inconsistent gaming experience.

You could indeed use Waylands (SteamOS) framerate limiter you can find in the Deck’s quick access menu, but this will inevitably introduce a massive amount of input lag due to its forced triple buffering. Another valid option would be leveraging half refresh rate V-Sync. In theory while using a refresh rate of 60Hz, this would slice the same amount in half and therefor cap the FPS at 30. Sadly this too won’t work because of a driver-issue with Proton.

During my testings though, I came up with an idea that revolves around something Simon Hallsten, more widely known as Flightlessmango, created called MangoHUD, which is the statistics overlay pre-installed on every Steam Deck. While it does provide various stats like battery drain, temperature, and individual CPU core speeds, it is capable of much more, including capping framerate without triple buffering!

To do this, you will have to go into your game preferences and set the launch option to: MANGOHUD_CONFIG=fps_limit=30,no_display mangohud %command%

Make sure to uncap the framerate in the quick access menu and keep the screen's refresh rate to 60 FPS. The MangoHUD solution does come with some frametime fluctuations, but personally, I rarely noticed that in my playthrough.

The Golden 40

Please keep in mind, that this preset will push your Deck’s hardware to its limit. Expect the device to get pretty hot and the game gnawing through your battery in no time - you can expect a battery life of one and a half hour - in rare cases up to two hours. But with my preset, you will be able to hit that beautifully smooth 40 FPS.

Swinging in the game pushes the builds a bit more and will have inconsistent framerates, but this generally evens out and never gets too bad to be jarring.

First off, I came across some interesting things that I would like to share with you. For example, I was initially very excited about FSR 2.0 in Spider-Man. Especially for the Steam Deck a true blessing, but the way it seems to work in Insomniacs proprietary engine result in both strange short frametime spikes and fuzzy visuals.

So I decided against those and opted for Dynamic Resolution scale on 45 instead, though I would love to see Nixxes add a specific 40 option. I’ve also noticed that the game’s Occlusion Culling isn’t always fast enough to catch up with a fast swinging hero from the neighborhood when using either FSR or ITGI, Insomniacs own upscaling technique.

During tweaking I furthermore noticed, that some textures on glassy buildings lack of reflections when set to low or medium. Even with screen space reflections activated, which fundamentally complement stuff like puddles, windows on buildings look rather dull.

Once we set Texture Quality to high, we get fancy cube maps, which mimic their surroundings. I also preferred to leave some of the medium preset unchanged to keep visual quality up, like texture filtering, ambient occlusion, and level of detail. Both Traffic and Crowd Density should be set to low though, as they will massively bloat up the data streaming and result in more framerate dips while traversing through the city.

Texture Quality Medium vs High. Just as an example of the windows reflections showing the big difference between the two settings.

Hair quality seems like a big strain in cutscenes and weather particle quality has also an unexpectedly huge impact to Spider-Man’s open world performance, so we set them both to low as well. Same goes with Depth of field, just make sure to not set it to very low as this ends up quite messy in some cutscenes.

Everything after that relates to personal preference, though I would definitely recommend on leaving Chromatic Aberration activated. Unlike how CA works in other games, here you will instead get a very slight but pleasant blurring towards the screen’s edge. This helps to visually fight aliasing which is often more noticeable in that area due to objects usually being closer to the camera. I personally prefer zero film and lowering motion blur strength to 5, because it still adds to the sense of speed.

We still have to accept some FPS dips while swinging through New York and in intense combat situations. This may be fixed in the long run since it’s related to the data streaming of Insomniacs engine due to the Deck’s limited power budget.

SDHQ SIDENOTE:

Through our testing of the build, we also note it is possible to cap TDP a little bit to curb the intense battery drain of the build. Setting the TDP to 12 stopped it from going over 22W drain and kept temps below 85c, with minimal interruption to stability. If you are okay with some drops when swinging though, you could lower it further. We tested TDP at 8 and it held up pretty well too, but it did compromise stability more.

SDHQ's 30 FPS Battery Build

Utilizing the golden 40 for Spiderman is an incredible way to play and works best for when you aren't leaving the house or only have little bits of time to be able to play. But what if you are going on a longer trip and want to maximize the battery you have? Well that's what SDHQ is here for!

Taking Timo's golden 40 settings, I started off bringing down the framerate using the launch command provided. While it did indeed have some instability, it really wasn't noticeable without the graph being in front of my face. I did end up playing around with some settings to see if I could improve the graphics while keeping battery down, but not much was able to move. Even turning down resolution and upscaling using FSR really looked horrible. This is a AAA game and while I wanted to bring it down further, changing just those allowed me to set a TDP limit of 9 to cap battery drain around 16W - 17W and keep temps below 75c.

With the TDP limit for the 30 FPS Battery build, the game still looks phenomenal and gives around 3 hours of battery life.

SDHQ Bugs and Crashes

In my playthrough, I did encounter some random crashes when changing settings, especially when changing texture quality while in-game. Anytime I tried changing the texture quality from medium to high, or vice versa, while I was in-game (not on the main menu), it would crash. This was, however, my only instance of crashes and otherwise didn't encounter any game-breaking bugs.

SDHQ Conclusion

Marvel's Spider-Man being on PC is something else altogether. Never did I imagine a day where we would be playing it...on our computers. And then adding on top that I would be able to swing through New York on a portable device? I would have called you crazy, yet here we are. Of course, there are definite compromises that need to be taken here, but in the end, you are getting an almost smooth 30 FPS or 40 FPS that would have never been possible before. It is hard to optimize and expect a AAA game to run like a dream come true on a portable device, but for this game, I would say it is one.

Deckverse is a Solo-project providing extensive high quality videos with accurate benchmarks, optimized Game setting presets and in-depth tech content all things Steam Deck. You can check me out on YouTube and can support Deckverse through Patreon!

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!

With a gritty take on a genre dominated by FromSoftware, Thymesia embraces the souls influence and decides to go on a slightly different path. As a man codenamed "Corvus", you must recover your memories to save the kingdom and decide the fate of Hermes. Harnessing the plague as your weapon, you will encounter unforgiving enemies and horrifying bosses which you must defeat to find out how to save this world. You will be able to level up your plague weapons throughout the game, as well as upgrade potions and even your own basic movements, giving you more freedom to play the way you want to. Thymesia sounds like a gem for the Steam Deck, but of course, we have to really find out for sure just how well it can run.

Thymesia: Max Settings

Thymesia is a gorgeous looking game, it really is, and at max settings that is still true. Unfortunately, max settings is definitely not the way to play. Not only will you have an unstable framerate, but you will also be met with a 25W drain and 80c-85c temps. Now, if you are fine with that, the framerate will generally stay above 30 FPS so you could cap it there, but with a drain like that, I wouldn't. You would get maybe 1 hour of battery, 1.5 if you stay in smaller areas. Luckily, there's a couple ways that we can fix this while retaining a significant amount of the quality of the game!

Thymesia at max settings can hit higher framerates...sometimes...but it generally dips below 32 and drains battery way too much!

The Optimization Cure

When opening Thymesia, I had a feeling I was going to want more smooth gameplay over visuals. This is a souls-like game and that means more intense action and precise movements. My goal was to keep visuals looking sharp while holding a stable 40 framerate. Through my testing though, I found a decent build that keeps a stable 40 around 95% of the time. Now I know it isn't stable, but let me tell you, 40 vs 30 makes a big difference. Though, I did notice some settings interact oddly with each other. I noticed this primarily with anti-aliasing quality and the in-game FSR. The FSR felt like it did nothing, but as soon as I turned anti-aliasing down to medium, it became significantly more pixelated with no changes to battery drain or temps.

Changing Anti-Aliasing from High to Medium shows a significant change in quality, way more than it should. And yes, this was the only setting I changed here.

Though, with textures and FSR being low, Shadows and Filter being on medium, anti-aliasing on high, and using 1152x720 with SteamOS FSR on with sharpness of 0, you get a very clear picture with almost no visual difference on the surface. Turning TDP limit to 10 and GPU Clock Speed Frequency to 1100 helps with keeping battery below a 18W drain with most microstuttering solved. Battery will generally stay around 13W - 16W with spikes to 18W. The hub world will experience a significant slowdown (down to 30 FPS), and while it can be fixed by increasing the TDP limit, I felt it wasn't worth it as you don't spend enough time in the hub world at all. We also changed FPS limit to unlimited while the screen refresh rate is set to 40hz. This is to ensure the least amount of input lag possible, as Thymesia definitely needs more precise timing.

Recommended Build screngrab. Thymesia looks absolutely gorgeous, and thanks to TDP limits, stays well underneath the 20W drain mark!

Now even with the more instability, I felt this was the best way to play. The smoothness of running around and fighting was just so fluid and wonderful. I did, however, want an option to increase quality even further and provide a more stable framerate with lower battery drain. By capping to 30 FPS, I was able to set all the settings to High while lowering TDP limit to 8. This brought the overall drain to around 14W-15W while keeping temps cool below 72c. The framerate at this is stable, but comparing 30 to 40 in a game like this is...well hard.

Recommended build vs Battery build. The battery build does have better quality too, and it does show a difference, but it is very minor.

Bugs and Issues

The game itself runs really well for the most part, controls felt nice and easy to utilize, though some in-game settings are not implemented well. Like I mentioned above, the in-game FSR doesn't work correctly. While it does have some impact, it is not as much as it should. Hopefully future patches can fix this behavior so we can utilize it much more effectively in Thymesia.

For the first time, I am recommending an unstable build. This is in part due to the kind of game it is and input. You will experience slowdowns in the main hub of the game, like stated before, but since you don't stay in the hub that much, it feels like a mute point. I did experience some other spikes here and there, but it was much less noticeable with the framerate graph off. Some executions did cause slowdowns too, but then bounced right back when you could control Corvus again.

I would recommend, if you decide to tinker with the settings further, keeping "Shadows" and "Filters" Medium or above. Anything lower dramatically affects how the game looks and it loses a lot of the gloomy charm it has.

Conclusion

I personally really like Thymesia. It feels like a faster-paced souls game that utilizes some unique mechanics, while still retaining some of the aggravating staples that makes other games in the same genre flourish. The performance could be better, and FSR could work correctly, but it wasn't terrible. While it is playable and runs well at 40 FPS, I felt keeping it unstable and saving more battery was more worthwhile than pushing it further. This could change in the future and I will update this review if it does! Overall, I would recommend the game and I genuinely had a good time with Thymesia, even if it just reaffirmed how terrible I am at souls-like games.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!

In an era of otherwise relatively mindless military shooters, BioShock stood apart as a thought provoking, politically charged RPG-hybrid that took direct swipes at the rugged individualism of libertarian politics. The game pulled no punches in its stance on “utopia” under a stateless society that lacked authority. You'll spend a dozen hours exploring the underwater “paradise” of Rapture, the once-breathtaking dream of one man fed up with taxation and regulation, long abandoned by all but the most fervent devotees and burnt out Splicers (addicts to genetic modification that lose all sense of self). As Jack, you find Rapture crumbling at the seams when you descend into its belly after a plane crash leaves you stranded at sea. 

BioShock Remastered is a fresh coat of paint on the otherwise unchanged masterpiece. 2K updated the textures and shifted the art design in some key areas, giving the then nine year old game a much needed overhaul that brought the timeless classic into the modern day. Does the extra polish stand up to another 6 years of aging? Let's load it up on the Steam Deck to find out!

The Deck Experience

BioShock Remastered is currently listed as Unknown in the Deck Verified program. Thankfully, Bioshock Remastered works on Deck without any extra setup!. The official controls work flawlessly out of the box with Xbox One glyphs indicating controls and the game runs smoothly, taking up the full 1280x800 screen during gameplay with menus at 1280x720. There are no middleware incompatibilities either. The only hiccup preventing this game from verified status, if 2K chooses to submit it, is if you exit the game without using the Quit to Desktop option in the pause menu or at the title screen, a mouse/touchscreen-only dialog box to launch in safe mode appears.

As an added perk the game supports Cloud Saves which is personally a must for me, as I switch between the Steam Deck and my PC regularly. Gyro controls function flawlessly, although you may find the game’s aggressive auto-aim fighting you from time to time.

BioShock Remastered’s Max Settings

BioShock has always had a well optimized, albeit buggy, PC port. A 2007 game with only mild changes for the Remaster, the Steam Deck does not struggle to run it at all at maximum settings. Because of this, there really wasn’t a need to change anything whatsoever to get this running fantastically. With cool temps of around 55c and 8W - 12W drain (around 4 hours of battery), it is already an excellent way to play. Valve’s Proton (7.0-3) works swimmingly as well, so no need to download another compatibility layer like Proton GE. All that said, it’s possible to command another hour out of the game with near-silent operation if you’re willing to make a few changes.

The Deep Plunge to Optimization

While BioShock isn’t an intensive game and commands a respectable three and a half to four hours of battery life at 60 FPS with maximum settings, it is possible to squeeze a little extra juice out of the battery with some tweaking.

Lowering the game’s settings to their minimum, except anisotropic filtering as this helps immensely with the detailed texture work in the game, and capping the framerate at 40 fps, squeezes out an additional watt or so of power, bringing battery life to approximately 4:30. Those savings are negligible considering that screen brightness makes up the majority of the game’s power draw in all but the least demanding areas. Quirkily, enabling antialiasing and distortion at the same time actually lowers GPU usage, possibly due to no AA being applied to distorted parts of the screen.

All testing was performed with the screen brightness and volume at 50%, as the difference between minimum and maximum screen brightness can have an impact of ~2w of power draw. 

For true battery hounds, the game’s resolution can be lowered to 928x580 with FSR set to a Sharpness of 2 at 40hz to muster 5 total hours of battery life. This odd resolution is the next lowest from native that does not stretch the aspect ratio of the screen in strange ways. Ultimately I can’t recommend this option except under extreme circumstances because of the massive impact of the gleaming, intricate, and flawed city of Rapture.

Bugs/Control Issues

Through testing, I noticed that attempting to manually adjust TDP or GPU clocks impacted frametime stability in an unacceptable way, even when the settings should have been far above what was needed to run the game smoothly. Something about BioShock Remastered’s engine does not play well with Valve’s performance tools. 

If you enjoy tinkering with the performance overlay, you may also run into a bug where it remains on screen even after being toggled off. Setting the overlay to its maximum setting, then lowering it to Off, setting it to 1, then lowering it to Off again consistently cleared this issue up for me. 

The controls were designed at a time where controllers were built less precisely and layouts weren’t standardized. The jump button is mapped to Y by default, which feels unintuitive in the modern landscape. Additionally, the game’s auto aim is so aggressive that it often overrides the more precise aiming afforded by the Steam Deck’s incredible joysticks and gyro aiming. Thankfully, autoaim can be turned off in the settings, but the archaic bindings cannot be fixed unless you’re willing to rebind controls using Steam Input. Doing so would make the in game prompts not match what you need to press. A more modern layout might look like jump on A, interact on X, reload on B and first aid on Y, with gyro mapped to R4.

BioShock Classic

As a quick aside the original BioShock is playable on the Steam Deck as well, but it isn’t a pleasant experience to launch. It requires extensive interaction with touch screen setup menus before the first launch, and the menus require mouse interaction that doesn’t work properly with the touchscreen. To access any menu options, you have to manually map the right trackpad to the mouse, go into settings, and then enable “Xbox 360 Controller” mode before you can navigate the menus with a controller. Upon booting in, I attempted to open the performance overlay, but pressing the “...” button froze the Steam Deck’s UI - while the game kept running I couldn’t even put the device into sleep. The only way to escape was to hard restart. In addition, the game only displayed in 4:3 in the middle of the Deck’s screen. Despite the “Playable” rating on the Steam store, I cannot recommend the classic release of BioShock on the Steam Deck.

Conclusion

BioShock was one of my fondest gaming memories growing up and the ending sincerely made me cry. It was a work of art then and remains a hallmark of its genre now. Bold, beautiful, unapologetically political and uncompromising in its vision, it is a treat to play on the Steam Deck. I envy anyone who is experiencing it for the first time and feel camaraderie with anyone playing it for the second, third, or in my case fifth time. Having it available on the go is far beyond what I ever thought possible playing it 15 years ago, and every minute I spent testing for this article brought a smile to my face.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!

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.

God of War's Max Settings

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.

The Perilous Journey to Optimization

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.

Conclusion

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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Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order was released in 2019 as a new take on the Star Wars gaming genre. Mixing “Dark Souls”-esque combat, action-RPG elements, and “Uncharted” styled platforming, the AAA release sought to immerse players in a graphically detailed environment containing new characters and a style of gameplay that is distinctly different from past Star Wars games. Having completed my first playthrough on Playstation 4 at release, I was excited to pick this up during the Steam Summer sale and evaluate how the game would perform on the Steam Deck.

Star Wars: The Maximum Settings

When I first booted into the game, I intended to push the Deck as far as it could go. I installed the game to the internal SSD (my Deck has the 256GB NVME SSD) and fired it up with Steam OS set to 60fps and all in-game settings set to maximum quality. While the game was certainly playable, I found it maxed out in the low 40 FPS range, frequently dropping as low as 25 FPS during heavy combat or cutscenes.

Using these settings, the game was consistently drawing 25+ watts from the Deck, leading to GPU temperatures in the high 80s and overall poor battery life of only 1.5 hours. Any changes to TDP essentially made the game unplayable, with it performing in the 15-20 FPS range. With this, I promptly decided to configure a 40 FPS build.

While max settings can look nice, the battery drain, temps, and framerate instability make it not playable.

Star Wars: A New Optimization

I reduced the refresh rate in SteamOS to 40hz and set my framerate cap to match. Overall, the game performed better than when set at 60 FPS, even off the Micro SD card. I did notice slightly longer loading times, and framerate drops of 10-15 FPS when loading or entering areas with more than 4 or 5 enemies.

Upon returning to those areas, however, there wasn’t any lag, leading me to believe the stutters had more to do with the read/write speeds of the Micro SD card rather than the Deck hardware itself. Looking into it further, the Fallen Order PC port seems to suffer from “micro-stutters,” which could be what I was experiencing. Also noteworthy, menus seemed to behave in the 20-35 FPS range in each configuration I tried.

The framerate in Star Wars averaged around 35-40fps in this 40 FPS configuration, dipping as low as 25fps for a second or two when loading, which is more than playable for me. The battery lasted about an hour and a half pulling around 20 watts on average.

Further optimizing the 40 FPS build, I lowered the in-game resolution to 1152x720, set the display to fullscreen, applied FSR scaling with 0 sharpness, reduced the TDP to 10 watts, manually set the GPU clock to 1000hz, and lowered the settings to medium. I didn’t notice any difference in overall performance or visuals, but gained an extra 30 minutes of battery life and the Deck ran at lower temperatures, which is a bonus in itself.

While the issues at 40hz were minor, I did end up dropping down to 30 FPS on 60hz, which performed the best and bought me an extra 30 minutes of battery life. The only time these settings suffered was during the final cutscene (no spoilers) and menus, where the framerate dipped as low as 20 FPS.

I retained the resolution, FSR, and GPU clock settings from the 40 FPS build, but dropped the TDP even lower to 8. This build, by far, provided the best battery life, and the TDP drop had minimal impact on performance. I did notice some of the visuals weren’t as vivid as they were on high settings, but the increased battery life was worth it for me.

Both the 40 FPS and 30 FPS builds performed well, but I’d recommend the 40 FPS build due to its decent battery life, low temperatures and GPU utilization, and overall performance. If you’ll be away from a charger for a long period of time, the 30 FPS build is an excellent alternative. There is also some stuttering in every build we tested, but this could be due to the PC port and there are reports of stuttering not just on Deck, but on desktop PCs as well.

As far as controls go, the default configuration works great out of the box. I found myself preferring the left trackpad over the D-pad for actions like using stims and switching lightsaber configurations. Even though my hands are rather large, it was easier to reach the trackpad with my normal grip.

I haven’t explored the possibility, but thought the rear buttons (L4-5 and R4-5) would work well mapped to some lightsaber combos, such as jump attack (A then X), double power strike (Y then Y), throwing your lightsaber (LB + Y), etc. I didn’t end up trying this in game, but did create a controller layout, details below the review. Feel free to modify it for your own uses.

Overall, I am thoroughly impressed with the Steam Deck’s ability to handle such a graphically intense AAA game and I found myself surprised several times during the playthrough. The visuals are stunning, even on the 1280x800 screen, and I found new appreciation in the color balance.

Notably, the blacks were “blacker,” making the areas where I needed to use my lightsaber as a flashlight much more realistic. Combat and platforming were fluid, and although temperatures and battery life varied, the experience was enjoyable overall. If the upcoming sequel, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, plays this well on the Deck, it will be a “must have” in my game library.

Need some help understanding how we got to our score? Check out our Guide to Steam Deck HQ.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!

Special thank you to Mr Doc Jones for helping with this review!

Resident Evil 3 Remake (RE3) is…well…a remake of the third game in the Resident Evil series as well as the third Resident Evil game Capcom released using the RE Engine.  It follows the continuing adventures of our master of unlocking, Jill Valentine, after the events of RE1 and overlaps with the events of RE2.  In addition to the stylistic and graphical changes from the original, there are a considerable number of content changes, including cut-content..  Despite this issue the game Capcom released follows suit with the RE2 remake. RE3 is another updated classic for the modern age of action survival horror.  Oh, and it plays really well on Steam Deck. 

Resident Evil 3: Optimization 

RE3 Remake has no issues running at a solid 60fps, but does tend to run hot (consistent 84*C) while at max settings. Thankfully, with some tinkering to settings and TDP, we can push that down immensely. Through the testing, I was able to get a solid 60 FPS build with a slightly lower resolution (Performance) and a 45 FPS build with crisp-looking resolution (Quality). I was also able to put together a battery focus build that does add about an hour to battery life, but the quality is a little unbearable at times and I would recommend against it. Personally, I would recommend the Quality build over the other two.

While there is a dip in battery usage, there is also a noticeable blurry downgrade in visuals.

Both of the Performance and Quality builds thankfully come with vast improvements on stability, battery, and temps. Both builds tend to stay around similar temperatures and decently stable frame rates between the two. There is about a 1W-2W difference in battery usage between each other. The RE3 remake has proven to be quite optimized and plays wonderfully on Deck. The biggest differences between the two are resolution (how crisp it is) vs frame rate.

While having a 60 FPS stable experience is always a treat, the tradeoff for having it with good temps and battery is some blurry visuals. Up close, it is still very clear, but the distance gets noticeably blurry. It isn’t too bad where it actually hinders gameplay, but it can be a little annoying after a bit of time. Compare this to the Quality build and you start to see what you are really missing out on. A stable 45 FPS doesn’t feel like anything is being compromised, and with the lowered frame rate, allows us to increase resolution and still keep stability. The meshes are more detailed, shadows look nicer, and lights just pop a bit more. The benefits here definitely outweigh the sacrifices.

The Battery build does save shave off some more temps and battery to keep things going longer and cooler, but these tradeoffs don’t justify it. The resolution is even more blurry and becomes heavily noticeable when playing. Again, it doesn’t deteriorate gameplay, but it does take away some enjoyment from it. All of this really adds on about an hour of gameplay and drops temps by about 5c, but since temps are already quite low in both the other builds, I would say it isn’t necessary at all.

The controls translated well to the Steam Deck and rebinding any keys was easy thanks to SteamOS. I decided to rebind due to personal preference, the default controls for RE3 work very well too. The biggest change I made was enabling gyro controls when holding the L Trigger down so I could more precisely kill zombies. Otherwise, the controls largely remained the same.

Conclusion

While many complained about this particular remake cutting corners when it came to content, the performance and fun factor on Steam Deck are still there. RE3 is so well optimized that it took very little adjusting to get the near-perfect cocktail for some zombie-killing! It’s action packed, atmospheric world entranced me and it has me extremely excited for the RE4 Remake.  Fingers crossed that it will be optimized well as this one!

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is the sequel of Black Ops and the predecessor of Black Ops 3 from the popular First Person Shooter franchise and is full of nostalgia for those of us raised on all the earlier COD titles. BO2 comes with a somewhat lengthy campaign that goes back and forth between modern and futuristic combat, a gratifying multiplayer experience filled with iconic maps, and the evolution of the well-received zombie gamemode introduced from World at War, Black Ops 2 gives players an incredible experience.

The 45 FPS build for me was the smoothest of them all, which is why it is my recommended build. I used native resolution since lower resolution with FSR was causing micro-stutters for me (1-2 fps drops consistently), but I had it tested with another person who didn’t get the micro-stutters so take it with a grain of salt.

The reasoning behind not capping the wattage is mainly due to the game not using a high wattage 90% of the time anyways, except for certain cinematics that require the wattage to not stutter throughout. For the setting used in this build the game would reach up to 68fps at times if not capped which does give the player wiggle room if you prefer better shadows or something of that nature.

Fair warning though, there will be select heavy parts of the game where you might get around 40 instead of 45 fps due to this. If shadows are necessary for you, I would lower the 8x MSAA to 4x MSAA. But for me, the 8 times was easily worth the shadow loss. I felt the scopes on turrets or snipers would look blocky, but in 8x that was not the case. With this build, the battery length is 4.5 hours depending on the mission at hand.

I didn’t encounter any big issues in Black Ops 2 except on some cinematics where the game will not have a stable fps, likely due to the game’s cinematics not optimized for Linux. If you are looking to play multiplayer and zombies, you are going to need Proton GE 7-22 or above installed. For zombies and multiplayer, all the settings will need to be on low all, while leaving the TDP Limit at 15W to try to help against the lag/stuttering. With that, it is currently possible to get a stable framerate if you change the refresh rate and cap to 40 FPS. Playing solo works well, but I experienced a lot of lag during any connection to a server in multiplayer and zombies, so I can't recommend playing them at this current state.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Conclusion

In the end, Black Ops 2's game’s campaign worked perfectly and it was great to re-experience it, but any multiplayer modes left something to be desired. While I could play Zombies alone without issues at 40 FPS, it was not enjoyable to play online, which I believe will deter a lot of players. If you are wanting to play through the Bo2 campaign, the deck would be a great way to do so. Otherwise, I would put more hope on the other CoD games for a better multiplayer and zombies experience. While I could play Zombies alone without any issues whatsoever at 40 FPS, it was not enjoyable to play online due to overwhelming connection issues.

Need some help understanding how we got to our score? Check out our Guide to Steam Deck HQ.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!

Hitman 3 is the newest game in the rebooted hitman franchise. Taking the role of Agent 47, a man with a barcode slapped on the back of his bald head, you head to exotic places to assassinate elusive targets however you can. Feel like shooting them? Go ahead. Poison them? Be my guest. Throw a can of spaghetti? Oh you’ll be making Chef Boyardee proud. Using their new engine, each location is beaming with beautiful vistas and creative gameplay. And if you own Hitman 1 and 2, you can import the missions and campaigns into Hitman 3 for no extra charge! With all 3 games in 1 package, this is an incredibly fun game to screw around in.

Reviewing Hitman 3 was tough. This game actually runs really well on the deck out of the box, but there are a few caveats like high temps and battery usage. Through my testing, I found two efficient ways to play the game, a focus on temp/battery and one on quality. The main difference for these ways is the in-game FSR settings. Turning FSR on ultra quality blurs the resolution a little, but saves on battery a LOT while turning it off keeps everything sharp at the cost of battery.

The game can run 40 FPS pretty consistently at medium settings, 30 FPS lock actually kept temps and battery life down a chunk. This was most apparent when there are crowds of people. At 40, crowds could bring temps up to 80c and battery to 22W, while 30 would spike it to 70c and 17W generally. Medium in-game settings felt like a good balance of quality while still keeping temps and battery in check. I also found limiting TDP can mitigate some spikes, but it comes in most handy when shooting for higher framerates.

I didn’t experience any audio issues, but there were a few glitches I encountered. The mildest one would be some random black boxes appear when turning the camera too quickly, but they also disappear near immediately. When the in-game FSR is turned on, there is sometimes a visible halo around Agent 47 and there’s some ghost trails when walking.

I also have been noticing some framerate lag, but it isn’t picked up in the system so I believe it is the game’s engine and not the frames it brings out. I see this much more when FSR is turned off as well. I also noticed that, even though the game is verified, some steam deck button icons don’t show up in game.

There is a launcher for this game as well. You have to either use the touchscreen or set one of the trackpads to control the mouse. Though all of the settings from the launcher can be changed in-game, so I would just hit play and change settings after the game is launched.

Hitman 3 - Conclusion

Overall, the game runs surprisingly well. This is a new-ish release that still takes a lot to run, but the Steam Deck handles it like a champ. Being able to play Hitman 3 in a stable environment on the go, albeit with some compromises, still astounds me. This was a game I never imagined I could play on a portable device, yet here we are.

Need some help understanding how we got to our score? Check out our Guide to Steam Deck HQ.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!