Tiny Glade Gets Custom Upscaling To Increase Performance on Steam Deck

If you haven't yet, follow us on X (Twitter), Mastodon, or Bluesky to know when we post new articles, and join our Reddit or Subscribe to us on YouTube to check out our content and interact with our awesome community. Thank you for supporting us!

If you have ever wanted to find a great game to relax with, check out Tiny Glade. It is a diorama-builder that allows you to create medieval-esque towns with details that you dictate. It's awesome, gorgeous, and one of the coziest games I have ever played. And right now, there's a new update being tested that should not only increase performance on the Steam Deck but also make it look better.

The new update that is in beta right now changes a couple of things, but the most interesting one for me is upscaling. Instead of adding FSR or XeSS, the team created their own upscaling algorithm, dubbed TGSR (Tiny Galde Super Resolution), and added it. This is the team's own algorithm to increase image quality without sacrificing performance, and it does very well. I checked out the default TAA at 100% render scale versus TGSR Quality at 100% render scale and found that it looks very nearly identical, and we have a higher framerate:

For a way to increase performance, upscaling is the way to go, but I was most intrigued by the fact that the team made their own algorithm instead of using the big three. They mentioned that they tested DLSS and FSR, but they don't have the kind of Vulkan support (or lack of licensing agreements) that they were looking for. In the end, their upscaling works well, and I am happy to see it.

The team is also testing new movable terrain chunks, rotatable towers, a lower minimum height for buildings with roofs, and allowing the terrain to be two times higher than before! We can also now toggle chimney smoke, the music system has been reworked, save backups have been adjusted, reduced temporal smearing and edge artifacts on water, and more.

You can check out the full changelog for the update via their Steam Community Post. You can try the beta for yourself by going to the preferences for Tiny Glade and setting the beta to "beta-1_13_0" in the "Beta" tab.

Tiny Glade is available for $14.99 and is rated Playable due to needing a community controller configuration, showing incorrect controller icons, small in-game text, and needing to manually bring up the virtual keyboard.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that will 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 you covered!