ARC Raiders is Here, And It's A Good Time On The Steam Deck

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ARC Raiders was provided by Embark Studios. Thank you!

ARC Raiders, a new PvPvE third-person extraction shooter, is out. The game has been highly anticipated across its beta tests, not least in our Discord Server. So now that the full game is finally out, we quickly dove in to check out how the game performs on the Steam Deck. We'll have actual gameplay impressions available at a later date.

ARC Raiders - Steam Deck Performance

I went into ARC Raiders dreading how it might run on the Steam Deck, if I'm honest. But I came away pleasantly surprised. You will need to force the use of either Proton GE or the Proton 10 Beta in the Steam game settings, though.

Controller support in the game is excellent, and it feels good to play. The game also supports 16:10 resolutions, so we don't get any black borders around the screen.

ARC Raiders defaulted to Low settings for me, and I recommend you keep them there. I swapped out the upscaling method from TAAU to FSR 3, and set it on "Balanced", which still resolved a decent image for me, then I locked the game to 40 FPS in the SteamOS settings.

Ultimately, this provided a relatively stable, decently smooth, and overall crisp enough image to be playable. There were some stutters on occasion, which could prove fatal, but they weren't too common.

Power draw was around 18W-21W, so battery life wasn't the best, but it was still enough for a few rounds of playing, around 2.5 hours on a Steam Deck OLED, and probably around 1.5 hours for a Steam Deck LCD.

I did experience lag spikes here and there, which I think was on the game server side, rather than my side, which was egregious at times, resulting in several seconds passing where the game appeared frozen.

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