Too big for Steam Deck? Many triple-A games are unplayable on Valve's handheld

Valve’s Steam Deck pushes out impressive frame-rates in a wide range of software – up to and including a range of current generation exclusives. A broad array of demanding games are at least playable on the portable and many cross-gen or last-gen games excel. However, the steady drumbeat of progress gets pounded every day and we’re seeing an increasing number of games that truly push current-gen consoles – and mainstream PC systems – hard. It stands to reason that if desktop computers are struggling, the Deck will be impacted to an even greater degree. With that in mind, we decided to look back at some of 2024’s biggest triple-A games. Which games work well – and which are indeed “too big” for Steam Deck?

Of course, the scale of ambition for any given game varies and a number of less demanding 2024 games still fare well on Steam Deck. Foremost in my testing was Lego Horizon Adventures, a beautiful UE5 title that runs at a high performance level on Valve’s handheld. With high settings dialled in and TSR upscaling set to 50 percent scale, we’re well within the range of a solid, stable 30fps experience – with 40fps a good target in many situations as well. We could cut settings down a peg to hit a higher refresh rate, but the visual target established here looks great. Image quality is solid with TSR and the game’s Lumen-powered lighting is perfectly intact as well.

Compared to PS5, image quality obviously takes a big hit, along with the quality of the shadow maps. However, outside of those changes – and some simplified water – it’s a broadly comparable visual experience. That’s really what we want to see on devices like the Steam Deck and Series S: broadly similar lighting and assets, with compromises coming mostly down to resolution. I don’t really have any objections to how Horizon Adventures looks here, and it operates at a really stellar performance level given how the game looks. Perhaps optimisation for the low-power Nintendo Switch yields some dividends here, though the visual outcome on Steam Deck is well beyond Nintendo’s last-gen machine.

A lot of other games run reasonably well, if not quite at that level. Sony’s PC ports continue to come in at a pretty rapid clip, and 2024 saw the release of God of War: Ragnarok. I ran Sony Santa Monica’s epic with FSR 3.1 in its performance preset with low settings across the board to keep the game running at a reasonable frame-rate. Low settings isn’t the end of the world as the game isn’t stripped of any basic lighting systems – volumetrics are still intact, for example, and the shadow maps look reasonable enough in typical play. It looks broadly like the console code, if obviously degraded in quality.