Atlas Fallen was provided by Focus Entertainment for review. Thank you!

Earlier this year, I had the incredible opportunity to go to PAX East and it was there that I played Atlas Fallen for the first time. I left feeling quite excited for the game, the action, world, and story intrigued me. There was a lot to look forward to and after talking to Deck13 and Focus Entertainment reps there, I left feeling confident that not only would this game be one to really enjoy, but also one that will be at least decently playable on the Steam Deck. Now that the game is almost here, and I had the chance to play through and review it, I have a bit more to say on the game.

Atlas Fallen is a large-scale Action RPG where you will surf across the sands to face ancient dangers, hunt monsters, and become the ultimate champion. After playing through the game and being able to experience what it has to offer, I feel it did a great job creating an addicting and enjoyable adventure, even with a couple of hiccups.

The story of Atlas Fallen is passable. You are a random person that is able to wield a powerful gauntlet, infused with enough power to rival Thelos, the god-like antagonist of the game. The narrative is told through cutscenes, dialogue, and journal entries you find throughout traveling. While I didn't find the story to be anything ground-breaking, I did enjoy the journey. Traversing around the world is pretty fun as well and sand surfing is the real highlight of this. Finding slopes to surf down and accelerate to go as fast as possible is a ton of fun. Though at times, the world itself did seem a little bland and bare at times. Luckily, there are side quests and random chests to find, but it didn't do much to change the overall feeling of the world.

The combat is where things got really fun for me. While the fighting can feel a bit slow at times, wielding gigantic, shape-shifting weapons is a blast. I loved being able to swap between two different styles at once, with each having their own strengths and weaknesses, and watch them grow the more you fight with the Momentum Gauge, which fills up as you attack and land hits. As it fills up, you will be able to execute different special attacks and get passive bonuses, which you equip using Essence Stones. You can also execute a Shattering Strike, which drains the Momentum Gauge for an ultimate attack.

Deck13 found a nice balance of simple mechanics and deep customization here. The Essence Stones are great for fine-tuning your build, while a lot of the stats like attack power, defense, and your shatter power, are tied to your armor. Your armor can be upgraded, which gives you perk points to further passively make your character more powerful. I also really like the blocking mechanic included here. You can dodge enemy attacks, but if you block at just the right time, you can crystalize enemies and bosses, making them vulnerable to attacks for a little. Blocking doesn't interrupt the flow of your attacking either, so you can attack, block, and attack without the flow ever ceasing.

Even with the little nuisances here and there, and an ok story, I really enjoyed Atlas Fallen. It didn't break any molds or try to get too crazy, but it added some nice mechanics that gave it a nice balance between too simple and too complex. There's something addicting about gaining momentum and turning your axe into a gigantic axe that can just demolish multiple weakpoints of a big boss in one swing. I had a lot of fun playing, and while I didn't get to try it, I can only imagine playing the whole campaign in co-op will be even more fun! Though, if you're going to play on the Steam Deck, there will be some compromises that need to be made.

Atlas Fallen - Steam Deck Performance

There are a couple things I found a bit odd when it comes to Atlas Fallen performing on the Steam Deck. First, the game settings have a couple of unique settings. For instance, there are separate window and resolution size options, as well as different intensity level sliders for post processing effects. The resolution size changes the game's rendering resolution, while the window resolution changes some of the text size (but not all). While the intensity sliders did change some of the visual effects you see, though for my enjoyment, I elected to keep them lower as it did help performance enough to justify.

Atlas Fallen also has FSR 2 that only works if both resolution and window size are 1280x800, but it doesn't help performance as much as just changing resolution size down while keeping window size at 800p. I also found that while changing resolution down helps performance significantly, it didn't change visuals as much and kept things looking relatively okay. The biggest change from this settings is text legibility for essence stones, armor details and quest text.

In the beginning, Atlas Fallen runs pretty okay. Keeping it at a solid 30 FPS, and even getting to 40, was very possible. But as I played the game more, and the world started to open up, it became harder to run. With this being a gigantic world that you can traverse quickly, there are some slowdowns when going around to new areas too fast. If you are running or surfing around in the immediate area, the game will keep a consistent rate, but other than that, it will slow down a bit as it loads in new areas.

I have also seen some framerate drops when in some combat scenarios. Fighting a gigantic enemy is usually okay 1v1, but when other enemies show up, and they all start using moves that kick up sand, it can start slowing down a bit.

In my opinion, these drops seem to be engine or game-related and not the Steam Deck's fault. I noticed that, whenever there were drops, the battery drain of the Deck didn't spike and CPU, GPU, and RAM usage was under 99%. This leads me to believe something isn't optimized within the game, causing these issues (and I did see similar ones on the ROG Ally). I believe we could see a lot of this patched up and the shader cache could help iron out some stutters when loading in new areas, but only time will tell.

Without any caps, and everything on low, Atlas Fallen still has some trouble sticking to 30 FPS completely stable in the open areas, but when in corridors, caves, or confined areas, the game can hit higher framerates running around and in combat. So, due to this, I actually only have 1 build for the game. Hitting above 30 FPS isn't viable, so my build is a mix between battery and performance. I have the resolution set to 960x600 with the window at 1280x800, lower intensity post processing effects, and low quality settings. I do have textures set to medium as they don't affect performance as much, but do help the game's visuals a bunch.

These settings, with a TDP limit of 10, allow the game to stick around 30 FPS most of the time with a battery drain between 11W - 18W depending on the area. I also found Proton GE helped a little bit in some harder scenes to keep the framerate stable. With these settings, some text will still be small, but I found the performance improvements to be too great.

The game does have 16:10 resolution support, so there are no black bars, and has full controller and cloud save support. I did test the game with CryoUtilities and the UMA Buffer set to 4GB, but I didn't see any discernable difference with either of these changes. I did also test the DirectX 12 version of the game, but it wouldn't launch no matter which Proton version I chose.

Conclusion

Atlas Fallen is a solid action RPG that gave me a bit of a mixed bag at times, but I loved the mechanics. The story is alright and does have an interesting tale woven in the desert world, though it pales in comparison to other deeper stories. At times, the world can feel a bit barren and dull, but surfing and going down slopes at an accelerated speed can be really cool. Combat itself can feel a bit slow at times too, but there is something extremely satisfying when fighting bigger enemies, or many smaller ones, when your momentum gauge is filled and your weapon grows in size, hitting multiple weakpoints or enemies at a time.

I love the simple nature of the armor system, perks, and the momentum bar. Atlas Fallen does well balancing out its simple systems and makes each different set of equipment, weapon, and essence stone feel special and impactful. As a game, I really enjoyed Atlas Fallen, even with its faults.

On the Steam Deck, it was a bit hard to play due to some of the performance issues it has, but with the tweaks, it becomes a lot more playable. It isn't perfect and still has compromises, especially with some readable text, but it is playable. It is very possible some future patches and the shared shader cache can help with some stuttering going into new areas, so I will evaluate again in a couple days when the cache is built, but if you are buying or pre-ordered the game, this will be the experience you get out of the box.

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

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Get ready to partake in the ultimate Lego Star Wars adventure! The Skywalker Saga spans all 9 of the mainline Star Wars films, allowing you to play through the entire series with over 300 characters, 100 vehicles, and 23 entire planets! The game takes a giant leap forward in Lego games in general with open-world gameplay, a new camera angle, side missions, upgradable abilities, and much more! If you're a fan of Lego games and Star Wars, this is the game for you!

Lego Star Wars: The Video Game was the first Lego game I played and it still sticks with me today. I fell in love with the gameplay and, being a fan of Star Wars already, it was awesome to experience the world in this way. Now, The Skywalker Saga takes that gameplay to a gigantic new level and MAN is it great. I absolutely adore the changes they have made with this entry and hope this is something they stick with for future releases. I can go on and on about this, but I believe a first look on the Steam Deck is in order!

In my initial tests, I found that resolution is the biggest contributor to performance, but also has minimal amount of visual impact (compared to other games). The stutters or performance issues came into play during extensive scenes or when fighting/breaking tons of objects. Going from 1280x800 to 960x600 with FSR Sharpness 0 seemed to have minimal impact on how everything looked overall, but significantly helped with stability of the framerate on a TDP limit of 9. The other graphics options have little to no effect on the performance, so keeping them at high and medium was okay.

There are still some minor stutters when breaking objects or fighting, but having a GPU Clock Frequency of 1200 helped most of them. Other than that, the game looks and feels phenomenal in most areas I have played so far. 40 FPS feels fantastic and with the battery averaging around 11W - 13W, I am extremely happy with the drain! Waking up the Deck with the game on did change controller prompts to KB+M, but pressing a button changed them right back. No controller issues I have encountered so far!

Overall, I would consider this a gem to play on the Steam Deck. The game itself is a ton of fun and with a couple tweaks, it runs fantastically too. Other than the small dips from time to time, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga shined at 40 FPS with good looking visuals and a great battery life for an open-world game. We will play more and try to create a higher framerate and quality build, but so far, 40 FPS is definitely going to be the way I play.

Screenshots:

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Get ready to immerse yourself in the wizarding RPG of your dreams! Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world RPG set in the land of Harry Potter. As your own created character, you will explore Hogwarts in the 1800s, discover magical beasts, master spells, craft potions, and become the wizard you want to be. Who will you befriend? What spells will you master? What legacy will you leave behind? Only time will tell!

Before I dive into the game, I wanted to take a moment to address the elephant in the room. SDHQ unequivocally denounces the horrendous comments made by Harry Potter's creator, JK Rowling. There is no place in this world for harassment or persecution in this manner and we will never accept it. Knowing this, we have still decided to review Hogwarts Legacy on our outlet. We are a gaming outlet first and we will never endorse or partake in any actions that go against our morals.

The developers at Avalanche Software have put in a lot of work and time to develop a gorgeous RPG that fulfills the dreams that many have had regarding the cultural phenomena. We have no reason to believe the developers share these views, and as a gaming outlet first and foremost, that is something we feel is important to cover the game. That being said, let's dive into the game on the Steam Deck!

VIDEO (Written Article Below):

Hogwarts Legacy starts out on a good foot, running pretty well at the 30 FPS mark on the recommended low settings. The first thing I noticed though is the game being set to FSR 1.0 instead of 2.0. Using 1.0 not only resulted in a worse image, but also created a lot of ghosting when moving around. Changing this to 2.0 quality seemed to fix this and have much better visual quality, with around 1-2W extra drain. For me, this was significant enough to keep and the game was able to handle a solid 30 FPS like this...for the most part. I also didn't really notice much difference enough between FSR 2.0 versions to justify bringing it down to performance.

Due to this being a new game, the shader cache hasn't been built yet. This means the game is more prone to stuttering, which Hogwarts Legacy has in spades. Walking around still stutters a bit, but the biggest ones come from casting spells in fights. There were 1-2 fights where it didn't, but most of the others created big stutters whenever I casted the spell. The game also had moments where framerate would become erratic or tank, which happened when selecting my house and the scene right after.

While the framerate counter says 30, the green bar below is very erratic.

While the game can handle medium graphics preset, I settled on keeping low as some areas tended to drain much more and keeping at the recommended still looked great while keeping stability. This also allowed a TDP limit of 10 to keep drain below 18W. I noticed a couple of odd things though, including almost no visual changes from low to medium. I also noticed that on Ultra, it could run at 30 in a lot of areas with high battery drain, but using Lumos cut framerate in half. Turning Lumos off went back to the normal framerate, which was a bit weird.

Overall, I’m actually quite impressed. Hogwarts Legacy is a new open-world game and, for the most part, holds its own while utilizing FSR 2.0 quite well. There still needs to be more testing, and hopefully the shader cache will smoothen the stuttering out in a couple days, but overall, this is going to be a solid experience on the Steam Deck! I will be going back in a couple of days once a patch and shader cache are out to go through it again, so stay tuned for an update!

Hogwarts Legacy Screenshots:

Comparisons:

Stills:

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Thank you to Square Enix for providing us with a copy of Forspoken to review!

A young New Yorker is hitting rock bottom right before she is transported to the beautiful, broken land of Athia. Now, with her newfound magical abilities, she must traverse the desolate land and find her way home. Forspoken will have you traveling all across the open-world with magic-enhanced parkour and taking down monsters in real-time combat with a range of flashy battle and support spells. You will also level up from your encounters and grow stronger while unlocking even more abilities to enhance the way you decide to play. Will you be able to survive the twisted monsters that await and make your way home?

From my time with Forspoken so far, I have actually been enjoying it gameplay wise. The game is flashy in the right ways and I like the real-time combat. It can feel a little repetitive at first, but after more magic was unlocked, I started to feel the variety and liked mixing and matching. The world felt a little bland in its color scheme, which the vibrant plugin helped fix, but it wasn't horrible. As a game, Forspoken is one I am enjoying much more than I thought I would, due to the reviews coming out for it, but let's take a look at how it runs on the Steam Deck so far.

For a game that recommends a RTX 3070 and 24gb of RAM, I am genuinely impressed how the game runs. There are a lot of compromises to make, which makes sense seeing as how new and intensive the game is, but it is ultimately playable! The game starts you out on the lowest settings, which makes sense given how much power this game asks for, but I elected to change FSR 2 to Balanced instead of performance. The game looked significantly better and didn't add to the overall power draw. Quality was also a step up, but not enough to justify the draw.

The game was still dropping more than I would have liked it to, so I forced the resolution down to 1024x640 and upscaled through SteamOS FSR. It didn't take much away from the visuals and did help keep stability down. This also allowed the game to stick below 18W, which is pretty amazing seeing as how most other builds I am seeing have a high 23W-27W drain. There will still be some drops, and you can raise the TDP limit to account for those if preferred, but the drops to 27-28 FPS weren't noticeable due to the 30 FPS cap.

I did experience one crash when I was playing, but this was most likely due to using too much RAM as I was playing with the settings (both the texture and model streaming was set to standard). I did also experience more slowdowns and battery drain during cutscenes, but most actual gameplay held up pretty well.

One big noticeable issue is loading. The game can take a long time to load into some cutscenes and the menus. It takes about 5 seconds to fully load everything in when going into the menu and sometimes coming out of it, which can be a bit annoying, but it isn't game-breaking.

Overall, I would consider this a success for Square Enix. Forspoken does have some optimization issues across the board, which patches could definitely help, and the shared shader cache is still being put together and should help a bit too in the next few days. The game itself is more fun than I expected and it is playable on the Steam Deck. It won't look as beautiful as it would on more powerful devices, and sometimes takes a bit to load, but to be able to play this on-the-go, I felt this is a good trade-off.

Forspoken Screenshots:

Comparisons:

Stills:

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

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Thank you to Jimmy Champane from Deck Ready for helping me test late-game scenes for this first look and TheFirstJosh for providing a save game I could test with.

Will you be able to bring this shattered world back together? In Death Stranding, you are Sam Porter Bridges, a delivery man who travels across a post-apocalyptic America to reconnect cities and society. The game features elements of stealth, as well as open-world exploration and a variety of missions to complete as you deliver packages and fend off enemies in this third-person experience.

Death Stranding is directed by Hideo Kojima, and with some of his signature storytelling and world building. The story can feel a bit convoluted at times, but is overall a fantastic experience, which the Director's Cut expands on. With new items, expanded combat, more customization, new missions, new structures, and more, the Director's Cut is the best way to experience this world, but on the Steam Deck, some compromises are needed to enjoy all it has to offer.

With Death Stranding Director's Cut, I had a mix of feelings. First, it started off with excitement as the 30 FPS with XeSS seemed to be holding up under a 17W drain, but as it got a bit more intense, the cracks started to form. They formed so hard that my game crashed about 3-4 times, all with different setting configurations I was testing and in different spots. Turning off all caps was a little bit better, but also drained a significant amount more that I didn't feel justified the slight increase in stability, and that's just regarding the opening areas.

Death Stranding: Director's Cut is a weird egg. The power draw is stagnant and doesn't change much with any graphics setting changes. On top of that, setting everything on the lowest possible settings with FSR 1.0 at performance mode only saved around 1W of drain and when caps were turned off, it still drained really high. I also tried forcing resolution with Steam and while it technically worked, it only decreased the size of the game's window and didn't change any battery drain or temps.

Jimmy from Deck Ready helped test this on his end. In one of the late-game factory scenes, he confirmed that regardless of the settings, there were drops no matter what. From multiple reports, you will start to see this more and more towards the late-game, making it near impossible to play at times with crashes and framerate drops. This kind of performance degradation started becoming a bit more noticeable after the patch that added in XeSS, so I decided to try the game in a pre-updated state to see how much the performance changed.

Death Stranding Director's Cut - Before XeSS

Before I go into the findings, I was able to go backwards in version by using the Steam console and downloading the corresponding manifest for the game and replacing the game files. I found this using SteamDB and going to the correct game depot. I will post a small guide on how to do this yourself soon because, as I thought, performance can be improved by downgrading Death Stranding: Director's Cut to the previous version. Due to borrowing a save from TheFirstJosh, I also had to hex edit the game's .exe file to bypass any corrupted save checks.

Just for transparency, this is the console command I used in Steam to download the old version of the game, which I then used to replace the files stored in the local area:

download_depot 1850570 1850571 7865482309805580274

While more testing needs to be done, I was finding the game to hold framerate much better in the older version, especially at 30 FPS, and at lower battery drain. When riding around on vehicles, I noticed a significant reduction in drops at a similar graphics setting with Ultra Quality on FSR. I did encounter bigger drops when it started raining and the BTs showed up, but switching "Available Video Memory" to Low and changing FSR quality to "Quality" did help bring this back up to 30 (TDP Limit of 9). Overall, more testing needs to be done, but I believe downgrading the version will be the way to go.

For comparison, I also tried a bit of the original game, which seems to run better than the DC version completely. This makes sense since it is using older graphical tech that isn't as demanding, but since it isn't on sale anymore, it doesn't matter too much.

Conclusion (For Now)

There is still a lot to test and go over with Death Stranding, but I believe the best way to play this currently is pre-XeSS update. With lower settings, it was able to handle the rain and BTs much better than before and still looked pretty decent with FSR on quality. If you want to just play without the downgrade, be prepared for late-game areas or spots where it is raining and BTs show up as it will slow the game down, possibly leading to crashes. Death Stranding is an awesome game and I highly recommend buying it just because of the content, but enjoying it on the Steam Deck in late game areas will require a bit of finessing.

Extra Screenshots:

Just some cool shots I got while I was testing:

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

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Do you love to explore and see new and unique locations with vibrant alien wildlife? Do you enjoy water? Do those both give you a similar amount of excitement when thinking about each? Well then enter into the depths of Subnautica! You have crash landed on an alien world and the only thing you can see is a vast ocean. Grab your scuba gear and head downwards as you explore underwater rivers, kelp forests, reefs, and more. Scavenge what you can and keep track of your food, water, and oxygen as you survive and build a new home, while discovering the mystery behind this new world.

Subnautica is a ridiculously cool game, but it does have some issues with playing on Steam Deck. The biggest glaring one is the controls. The default control scheme doesn't work at all, so you will need to set up a different configuration. I used the "Steam Deck Configuration" community controller configuration made by LarryWF.

There are also framerate stability issues I noticed right off the bat. I decided to play this at 40 FPS due to it being an older game and I preferred the fluidity, and while it can be done, there are some stability issues. Loading in new objects does slow the game down and it can obviously pop in. This can cause an issue when moving to new areas or exploring. I don't think it is as noticeable with the overlay off though.

Even with all of this, I do enjoy playing Subnautica this way. With a mix of settings, a TDP limit of 8, and FSR, the game can get you around 2.5 - 3 hours of battery life with sub 70c temps. I would call this a success in general! I am looking forward to exploring more of the game soon.

Subnautica Comparisons

Water Quality:

As you can see, the surface on the water is greatly affected by this settings. It doesn't change much when underwater, but seeing as how the surface is visible in most of the game, I felt the increased power draw was worth it for this huge graphical change.

Color Grading:

Color grading was another tough one. I like the style of Filmic more overall, but turning it off really helped in certain areas. I believe it is more worthwhile to keep FIlmic on, but I think this can be up to you in general.

Screenshots:

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

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Saints Row the Third: Remastered is a...well remaster of the original SR3 game. Think of this game like the crazy version of GTA. You run around in an open-world, kill whoever you want to, steal vehicles, and much more. You also have insane weapons like a dildo and...well I don't want to spoil TOO much, but it is a great game, my personal favorite in the series.

The game does seem to cap itself out at odd times when it comes to the settings. I found a nice couple builds that work well too, perfect for any scenario. The recommended build focuses on a mix of all of them with a slightly higher priority on battery life with primarily medium settings and a 50 FPS cap. The build keeps the game looking nice and sharp with silky smooth gameplay.

The other builds tend to have a couple odd issues, but work fine generally. There are some points where these builds will actually have better temps and battery drain than what I am reporting. I haven't figured out exactly why yet, but it doesn't last that long and everything will spike back up.

Overall, the game runs and looks wonderful on the Steam Deck. It's a great alternative...considering we can't play the new one on SteamOS (there's a possible workaround editing the EXE, but have not tried it yet).

Screenshots:

Recommended Build:

Quality Build:

60 FPS Build:

Comparisons:

Note: This was one of the times the Quality build had lower temps, these shot up as soon as I moved away from this spot.

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.

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

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Days Gone is a wild ride from the moment you set foot in its world. You will traverse a beautiful land, driving your motorcycle through the forests and war torn camps filled with other survivors, all from the perspective of a biker who falls into the ride or die stereotype with his crew coming before anything. In a devastated world with Zombies everywhere, you will have to watch out not just for the horde of mindless corpses, but you will also need to help obnoxious survivors…who are arguably worse and make themselves out to be way more important than they are. You will have to do quests for different camps and maintain the relationship with them all to use that favor to customize your bike and unlock a plethora of weapons you can use to fight off the horde. Thankfully, you won’t have to deal with hordes often as you ride your bike through the open world protecting your kin, but when you do, you better be ready for a fight that could cost your life if you aren’t prepared. 

Days Gone - Default and Max Settings

Default settings were able to run pretty well surprisingly, but sadly in the end it wasn't enough for a stable 40 FPS even just in the open world riding around on the bike. It is enough for stable 30 in most of the game but sadly, when hordes come into the equation, it could barely maintain 30 FPS unless you aren’t limiting TDP. The Temps were a lot higher than I would have expected on this game but for the default they were usually around high 80s low 90s for CPU and low to mid 80s for the GPU. Now when it comes to battery life you’d be lucky to hit 1.5hours but during the horde 

Max settings sadly were not up to snuff even at max TDP. I was not able to get stable 30 no matter the situation I was in. The good thing is that the max settings only had 1 degree higher temps than the default did and had basically the same wattage. At this rate, I would not recommend trying to play the game at either of these settings. Though it is possible, you will not have a good experience throughout the game.

While temps can go down in certain areas, framerate instability and massive battery drain is much more common.

On the Road to Optimization

The recommended build keeps most of the quality close to max, while both looking and running better than it did on the PS4 version. When it comes to Proton, I ended up choosing the stable 7.0-3. Proton GE 7-27 did cool down CPU and GPU by around 1c-2c, but this was at the cost of framerate which I felt wasn’t a worthwhile tradeoff. Now the game has a very stable framerate,  but it did have a few problem areas regarding helicopters flying over you or when you die from a huge horde of zombies with multiple fires around you. Could it have better temps and use less wattage? Yeah, but it still accomplishes what it sets out to do with a mix of high and medium quality settings. I went with lowering shadows and foliage distance first because less items would be on the screen and would help lower the CPU usage. This is necessary thanks to hordes maxing out the CPU with hundreds of zombies moving all at once independently. With the settings at this mix, I was able to set the TDP to 12. This left battery drain around 17W - 22W, while temps never went above 82c, which for a large open-world game with tons of moving models, really impressed me.

The 40FPS build took a lot to achieve. Sadly, I did have to sacrifice basically everything to low and lower the resolution quite a bit just to ensure the fps would stay stable, especially while experiencing a horde. This caused me to see how little a wattage difference these setting caused as well which made me see the pointlessness of a battery build for this game since it would be at 30fps with everything at low yet would only make the 30FPS build last about half an hour longer which does not seem worthwhile.

40 FPS might feel much smoother, the quality of the recommended build, as well as stability and better temps and battery drain, make the choice a no-brainer.

Throughout the entirety of my run, I had a great experience except for four crashes, which were seemingly at random. I hope this will be fixed, but it occurred regardless of the settings and Proton layer I was using, so I deduced this was an issue with the game internally. Otherwise, I didn’t encounter many issues while playing the game.

Conclusion

Going into it, I knew Days Gone wasn’t going to be an easy game to optimize. This is an open-world AAA game that can have hundreds of people on screen at times. I expected it to be on the hotter side of the temps with drain that would only give me around two hours of battery life. What I didn’t expect was that despite all of this, it felt like the premiere way to play this game. With crisp visuals, a 99% stable 30 FPS, and 2 hours of playtime, this game shines where I didn’t expect it to. Of course it could be better, but for what the game is, I am pleased with the performance!

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

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Elden Ring is an open world Souls game, which features a large variety of enemies and areas with plenty to explore and experience. With many possible builds to play your way, you will trek across a unique land that makes you want to explore every inch of it. Use magic, swords, halberds, and even prayer, to dispatch a variety of enemies that can range from giant crows to giant shrimp to giant dragons...I might be seeing a pattern here. Be ready though, this game is not for the faint of heart. Plan your strategy wisely and enlist the help of your friends, though this could be your undoing. Now, how does this open-world AAA game that came out last year run on Steam Deck?

Elden Ring Optimization

When trying Elden Ring out at max settings, it actually ran ok. It would stick above 30 FPS, which would mean capping it could be do-able. The biggest problem though was temps being around 80c just standing still and a whopping 24.9W battery drain. To me, the best way to play is a combination of high, medium, and low settings, but set to a locked 30 FPS. This was by far the smoothest and most stable way to play, while also allowing a longer battery life. Sadly, the game does have about 6 areas that I can’t list, due to spoilers, that no matter what the settings are, drop 1-2 frames. The good thing is that those frames don’t cause a noticeable stutter so gameplay felt quite smooth. I also locked the TDP to 9, making sure the battery usage doesn't go up much further than 16W almost the entire time. I also tried Elden Ring with this build while docked to my TV and thought the game was still able to look quite appealing even on the larger screen.

I really wanted to do everything I could to get a 40 FPS build up and running. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a fully stable build for it. I was able to get very close, with framerate dips down to 36-37 that weren’t super noticeable, but it did come with a cost. Pushing the resolution down to 1152x720, and turning graphics settings to lowest, got Elden Ring the closest it possibly could to a stable 40. There is a quite noticeable difference, and the framerate isn’t stable, but it is the closest I believe is possible to hit something higher than 30 FPS without the Deck overheating and losing too much battery.

While both are stable here the recommended has much better temps and battery, while looking much more sharp.

In the end, the game finds it impossible to hit 60 FPS, but can be stable at 30 FPS and low battery usage with some compromises. Elden Ring on the deck is for people that will accept those shortcomings in exchange for portability, which still baffles me. This is a AAA open-world game that just came out and looks sharp and beautiful, but still runs at a stable rate. While it cannot hit 40 FPS, Elden Ring runs like a charm with minimal issues and will be a fantastic addition to anyone’s library for their Deck.

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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!