Titles including A Plague Tale: Requiem, Gotham Knights and The Witcher 3: Complete Edition can challenge capable gaming PCs - so where does that leave Steam Deck? digitalfoundry investigates.
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.
Unfortunately this game is very demanding on PC and that causes big problems on the Deck. Certain areas are mired in the low-to-mid 20s, producing an experience that is tough to play. Big stutters abound, mostly popping up during traversal. These are the same issues I've observed on last-gen consoles, but it's a little bit worse than the Xbox One release in my opinion. We're profoundly CPU-limited in its most troubled moments, while other areas are GPU-bound.
With these settings and the OS-level 30fps cap, hitting a stable 30fps is very achievable. Driving around the city and races doesn't cause any sort of dips in consistency, at least not frequently. There are periodic stutters, however, during intense moments. Yes, once again, the CPU is too limited - the game is more than capable of saturating eight threads and causing periodic dips at times.
I was also happy to see Uncharted 4 run well on Steam Deck, in common with many of Sony's PS4 ports. I could run the game at native output resolution using FSR2 in its quality mode to lighten GPU demands, working in combination with medium settings. Stacked up against the PS4 release, Steam Deck looks very similar. Depth of field is a bit on the strong side but this seems to be a byproduct of rendering resolution and everything else is roughly on par in the areas I sampled.
Finally it's worth touching for a moment on how to handle frame delivery across these titles. To get a 30fps lock, I used the system-level 30fps cap, which does indeed deliver a consistently frame-paced 30fps - at the cost of noticeably increased input lag. There is a way to side-step this issue that can work well. By typing MANGOHUD_CONFIG=fps_limit=30,no_display mangohud %command% as a launch parameter you can achieve a 30fps frame-rate limit without as much input lag.
It is absolutely true that the Steam Deck can power compelling experiences with recent big-budget games - but as we've seen today, it's possible to hit the system's limits on key titles - even with everything running at minimal settings. The AMD Van Gogh APU at the heart of the Deck is an impressive portable chip, but clearly, it has its limits - especially in CPU-limited scenarios.
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