Cairn Developers Address Steam Deck Performance Issues With Temp Solution

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Cairn is one of the big reasons this year has started off so strongly in regard to games. It's a fantastic climbing simulator, where we will go up a huge mountain, controlling one limb at a time, to make our way up. It's a great experience, and one I loved playing through, but performance on the Steam Deck is not great. It's a big issue, especially further up the mountain or when looking at the mountain from a wide angle. However, it seems as though this problem won't plague us for much longer.

In an update posted yesterday, Cairn's developers, The Game Bakers, addressed the performance issues on the Steam Deck, noting that they have been seeing the comments and outcry from players. They mention that they are working on a patch to improve performance further, and it's great to see them on top of it.

They also provided a temporary workaround to improve performance for the time being while they work on a permanent patch. To improve the Steam Deck's experience for right now, you can use this launch option in Cairn's Steam game properties:

-force-vulkan

In the early parts of the mountain climb, we do see some pretty nice improvements across the board. At the low settings with 1280x800 resolution, we can see a 5-10 FPS improvement depending on what you are looking at. The big framerate improvement I am most happy to see is when looking at the entire mountain, which in some cases went from the mid-30s to the low-40s.

However, this doesn't solve performance for the entire game. In the later sections of the game, especially towards the top, the framerate will drop to around 30 FPS and lower. The snowy effects can be pretty overwhelming for the Deck, and while there are some improvements here and there, it won't be able to handle over 30 FPS throughout the whole game.

I would also still recommend playing the game on the low settings. Medium with the launch option is going to a little worse than the default experience on low, and the visual tradeoff, while noticeable, isn't worth the performance drop. So, keeping it on low with the default 1280x800 resolution is going to be best.

Still, it's obvious to see the improvements, and The Game Bakers deserves praise for it, though I do hope they will be able to make it better throughout the entirety of the game. I love Cairn, so seeing improvements is going to make me extremely happy. It still won't be fully improved throughout the whole game, so I wouldn't change the settings too much, but it's nice to see any improvement at all.

Cairn is on sale for $26.99 until February 12th and is rated Verified.

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