Can Steam Deck handle a range of PC's most challenging games?

Since its launch, Valve’s Steam Deck has delivered plenty of mobile miracles, often able to deliver exceptional visuals and creditable performance – despite the unit’s actual capabilities sitting far below advertised minimum specs. Judged on its own terms, it’s certainly a powerful device though, with its quad-core Zen 2 CPU and a 1.6TF GPU that’s fully compliant with the latest DX12 Ultimate API requirements. However, as we move out of the cross-gen period, PC titles are becoming more demanding – while major launches like The Callisto Protocol, The Witcher 3 Complete Edition and Gotham Knights see profound performance issues on PC. So how well do these games run on the Valve hardware? Are they too big for Steam Deck?

I kicked off my testing with a game that is generally highly demanding on graphics hardware, with areas that also hit CPU hard. Asobo Studios’ A Plague Tale: Requiem is one of the best-looking games around and a stress test on PCs and consoles. It’s a current-gen exclusive game that targets 30fps or 40fps on consoles – so not exactly a great candidate for Steam Deck, where we’ve often achieved good results by running titles designed for 60fps at half frame-rate, with reduced quality settings.

As expected, we really need to drive down the settings if we want to salvage any kind of decent experience, so I pushed all relevant settings to their lowest option without turning them off, except for texture resolution. Image quality-wise we are running at 720p, but upsampled from a much lower base pixel-count – performance mode is likely a mere 360p, albeit with temporal reconstruction adding extra detail. Measured up against Series S, we’ve basically managed to preserve the game’s visual feature set – there are no glaring omissions in terms of lighting or model quality. Instead, there are a range of smaller downgrades: missing ground tessellation, lower-quality foliage, and pulled-in draw distance, among other cutbacks.

Even so, image quality takes a larger hit. The upsampling does a decent job of handling opaque surfaces, but transparencies are really messy. Expect to see a lot of fizzling, popping, and other obtrusive image artifacts on foliage. The upside is that we have managed to mostly pull 30fps out of Requiem on the Steam Deck, using SteamOS’s internal frame-rate cap. However, towns cause issues. These NPC-dense areas are notorious for hammering CPUs on other platforms, and the same is true here. Expect to see some pretty hard stutters and frame-time fluctuations here as the modest quad-core CPU struggles to keep pace, like in the market area in Chapter two. Overall though, it’s mostly fine – so this is a qualified success.