No Rest for the Wicked Patch 2 Doesn't Appear To Help Much on Steam Deck

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No Rest for the Wicked has recently had some amazing updates and transparency from Moon Studios. It has been a pleasure seeing what they are working on and prioritizing. While the new Patch 2 was meant to be one that significantly helped performance on the Steam Deck with new memory improvements, it seems like it wasn't enough, and we may have to wait a little longer to play without crashes.

Patch 2 is quite a hefty one, and it added a lot of new improvements to affect performance. We have FSR upscaling, CPU optimizations, lowered texture resolution for Performance Mode, fixed memory leaks, optimized CPU spikes, and more. However, for the Steam Deck, the biggest improvement is the optimized memory budgets. This is massive since the majority of issues and crashes stem from running out of memory. This should have been fixed from this update, but from what I can see so far, it hasn't done enough.

From starting the game, I still had massive memory usage, and after 10 minutes of running around in different areas, I encountered significant drops and two crashes. All of which seemed to come from the world loading in, which resulted in RAM spikes and ended up crashing the game.

I also heard that the game was running better on SteamOS 3.6 and even 3.7 over on the Main OS Update branch, so I tested them both as well. Unfortunately, RAM usage was the same and I had similar issues as I had on the stable branch. I will say that SteamOS 3.7 didn't have any crashes, but I did get parts of the world loading in late and high RAM usage.

While I do still feel that No Rest for the Wicked will be good on the Steam Deck in the future, this patch didn't make it that way. I had high hopes due to the memory optimizations and the implementation of FSR, but unfortunately, it didn't do much. At some points, it even seems like the game is performing worse overall, which is the opposite of what we need right now. If you want to play right now, you can increase your UMA Buffer to 4G and use CryoUtilities to help, but without these, you will experience the crashes at some point.

I will give props to Moon Studios for being transparent and talking about what is going to be implemented, but due to these issues, it is hard to recommend playing on the Steam Deck just yet.

No Rest for the Wicked is available on Steam for $39.99.

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