Yesterday, we looked at No Rest for the Wicked on the Steam Deck for a first impression, and while I am optimistic that it will get better, some performance drops and memory issues persist and can cause some issues. But that isn't deterring the team, and after talking to Gennaidy Korol, co-founder of the studio behind the game, I have a lot of confidence that this will be a fantastic game to play on the Deck.
First, there was a patch that was released a couple of hours ago that added some nice improvements. There are some performance optimizations for rendering, balanced and performance quality modes, visual effects and fog, and the ship prologue, as well as some smaller ones here and there. And while I do still need the 4GB UMA Buffer for RAM, the game is running noticeably smoother! I can fight the boss at 30 FPS with only minor drops at 80% render scale, whereas before, I needed to bring it down to 50 to get decent performance.
There were still some drops, but they were nowhere near what they were before. Combined with the 60 FPS simulation running in the background, I was able to beat the boss, and all my inputs were responsive regardless. The game may not be 100% better yet and still needs some fixes for a truly solid Steam Deck experience, but this is a fantastic step forward—and it's only been two days since release!
When talking to Gennaidy, I asked about optimizing for the Steam Deck, and I left the conversation even more optimistic about the future of No Rest for the Wicked. To get it running as well as it is, there had to be a lot of memory optimizations, texture and level streaming, and rendering performance improvements. And while more will be made, it was still important to get it up as much as they did for early access release. As for future updates, we should see more performance and rendering improvements immediately, while a big cleanup of memory will be following, which should reduce crashes and ensure we don't need a 4GB UMA Buffer.
I feel more confident that No Rest for the Wicked will be a great game on the Steam Deck as it is being developed. Even if it isn't perfect right now, the improvements made so far and the developer's plans to improve the game give me confidence that it's a worthwhile investment.
No Rest for the Wicked is currently available in early access for 10% off at $35.99 until May 2nd.
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hi, I don’t know if you answer under comments or not, but I have a few questions:
1) Did you have total system freezing during the game, and if so, were they with the aforementioned UMA buffer?
2) Why do you need to increase the size of this buffer if steam deck itself allocates memory as needed, and by setting the value manually we only reduce the amount of RAM, correct me if I’m wrong, thanks
Hello! I am happy to answer questions wherever they come in.
1. I did have total system freezing before the buffer change often. I did have 1 after changing, but it was significantly less frequent.
2. I increase the UMA Buffer due to the game needing more dedicated VRAM for the GPU. For games that suffer due to high RAM usage, this can help force more RAM to your GPU and ease the system from trying to dynamically allocate too much RAM and cause crashes.
Not only does this article give me confidence that the game will run well on Steam Deck - I think this game will be a great fit on Steam Deck from a design standpoint. It's an action-adventure game with less demanding graphics than AAA and more controller-friendly ARPG controls than Last Epoch, Diablo IV, etc. I think Moon Studios was smart to put this in early access and I'm very hopeful in the long run considering their Ori track record.