Until Dawn Update Improves Performance for Steam Deck, And It Is Better

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When Until Dawn came out, I was blown away by the game. It gave me a new appreciation for those cinematic third-person titles, and while there have been many more released since then, there's still a special place in my heart for Until Dawn. Recently, PlayStation released a remake of the game, and while it definitely didn't need it, I am very pleased to see a PC release. Unfortunately, it wasn't the greatest game to play on Steam Deck, but this may have just changed!

In the new 1.05 patch from developer Ballistic Moon, we have a nice slew of changes that have been implemented, but the most important one for us is easily the performance improvements for Steam Deck and lower spec PCs. We also have a small dll error that could cause the game to fail on booting on the Deck. So, with both of those together, we should have a much more playable experience in general.

And it actually does seem like performance has really improved! Comparing performance before, we are now able to hit a much more stable 30 FPS throughout the prologue on the low settings with FSR 3 at Balanced. It does need an unlocked TDP limit, and there are some stutters here and there, but primarily, Until Dawn has been sticking to 30 throughout the prologue and parts of the first chapter.

There is still a lot to play, so this definitely isn’t a definitive answer on how well it is going to run throughout the entire game, but it is a great sign. I was seeing players at lower settings getting close to 25 FPS in the prologue, so going to higher settings and sticking over 30 FPS is fantastic. I am looking forward to playing more and seeing how well it runs, but I am very pleased so far.

I could see the rest of the game running quite well and over 30 FPS, with some minor drops and stutters in the more active scenes, but it should still be relatively playable. I would consider this a safer bet now, but again, we need to play more to be really sure about it.

With the update, we also have FSR upgraded to 3.1.1, which fixes up the Frame Generation issues that a lot of people were encountering. There were also some small bugfixes, Vsync and Resolution Scaling is working again, and UI prompts will not be off screen when playing at 16:9 aspect ratio. The team also notes some known issues they are working on, including making frame generation independent of upscaler (so you can use it with XeSS), raytracing tweaks, TSR getting upgrade, and making HDR work outside of fullscreen.

You can check out the full changelog via their Steam Community Post.

Until Dawn is available on Steam for $59.99, but if you want to support us, you can buy it on Humble for the same price using our affiliate link. If you are a Humble Choice subscriber, you can get 10% off and only pay $54.

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