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.
The game’s performance level is solid and relatively stable, usually reaching or exceeding 40fps. It actually lands on 40fps exactly a curious amount of the time, often hugging that specific frame-rate for extended periods. I couldn’t pinpoint an exact cause here, but Ragnarok’s performance does oscillate up and down somewhat depending on load, just less than you’d normally expect. It’s a reasonable, if unexciting, turnout for a cross-gen title. Image quality takes more of a hit than I’d like as FSR struggles with particle effects and other complex content, though it doesn’t look too bad on the Steam Deck’s actual display.
Metaphor Refantazio is another title that basically works well enough on Valve’s handheld. I ran the Atlus RPG with some pretty normal settings selections at native 720p. Metaphor has somewhat lopsided performance as 60fps is easily achieved in dungeons and fights, while more complex city scenes bring us into the twenties. It’s not exactly the most visually complex game – or a particularly performant one, considering its visuals – but we can score a decent enough 30fps experience here.
However, more demanding titles stress the Steam Deck’s capabilities in a more fundamental sense. Black Myth: Wukong benefits from minimum settings across the board to work acceptably, though I did bump shadows to medium to avoid some distracting artifacting that was present with low shadows. The visual outcome is less than satisfactory, with lower quality indirect lighting, odd-looking enemy fur, and artifact-ridden imagery. Frame-rates though are reasonable, considering the game’s pedigree. We’re in the 30-50fps range typically, with occasional stutters but no real extended frame-rate drops outside of the game’s introductory sequence, which remains very demanding. Later stages in the game are reported to have bigger stuttering issues on PC though, so performance may flag in other areas.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard rounds out our selection of ‘playable’ Deck games, but only barely in my opinion. To get acceptable performance, I had to dial in the low settings preset, using the game’s well-calibrated DRS system pegged to 30fps with FSR 2, with a minimum value of 20 percent of 720p, or 144p (!!). Using DRS gives us the crispest visuals realistically possible, though certain intense moments can appear a little abstract towards that lower resolution bound. I generally don’t mind FSR 2 in Veilguard, but the low res rendering doesn’t flatter this game’s detailed artwork. Frame-rates are sort of reasonable. Despite using DRS, there’s a wide variance between scenes, with the game floating from 30fps to 60fps in typical play. It doesn’t really drop beneath 30fps though, which is the metric we’re looking for. Again, image quality is the major sacrifice – the game really doesn’t look like itself at the resolutions contemplated here.
Unfortunately, a large contingent of recent AAA fare runs extremely poorly on Steam Deck, to the point where I’d deem the games broadly unplayable. Some games are borderline, like Final Fantasy 16 where performance is a bit lopsided. In lighter scenes with the onscreen settings, there’s a decent turnout, holding in the 40-60fps range. However, more intense content – including most cutscenes – drop beneath 30fps. That reflects the game’s performance on PC and consoles, where the game is unusually heavy, with somewhat spiky GPU-bound frame-times. I’d say this is not quite there in terms of playability, and Valve agrees: like all of the games we’ll be discussing after this point, it earns the “unsupported on Steam Deck” label on Steam.
Horizon: Forbidden West is technically a cross-gen title, but its PC iteration is based firmly on the PS5 code – and it runs rather poorly on Deck. The game has a pretty handy DRS system here, which helps to salvage image quality and keep performance in check, but spiky frame-times and sub-30fps stretches are still common on the very low preset. Moving on, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 actually manages to hold up a lot of sequences, as long as we dial settings quite low. The problem is that the issues emerge in bigger fights, where the large number of foes seems to overwhelm the Deck’s four core CPU. Performance figures here aren’t great and as such, I’d deem the game basically unplayable.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is similarly fated. Low settings with FSR 3 in ultra performance mode produces inconsistent gameplay with long stretches below 30fps. That includes the now-infamous city run that pushes up CPU load, as well as stretches in the wilderness, where we can hit frame-rates around 15fps. This is Dragon’s Dogma 2 at its lowest settings, without ray tracing, but it’s still substantially too heavy for Valve’s handheld.
That extends to a due or Unreal Engine 5-based epics from last year. Unsurprisingly, Silent Hill 2 is a pretty miserable experience here, with poor frame-rates even at the lowest settings I could configure. The trifecta of Lumen, Nanite and heavy volumetrics is likely killing performance here, as the Deck is just nowhere near where it needs to be. I also gave STALKER 2 a brief shot, which lets me configure a static 25 percent resolution scale with TSR – just 160p. The visuals are rather ‘painterly’ and the game has some obvious CPU issues, though GPU-wise it’s lighter than Silent Hill, at least as it can be configured here.
Star Wars Outlaws and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle were also part of my preliminary testing list, but neither made the grade during my testing, as neither can progress past the splash screen. Outlaws seems to have a longstanding controller issue, while Great Circle seems to have a problem in a recently introduced patch. I wouldn’t expect good things out of either game though, even if they were running correctly.
Overall, the Deck just isn’t up to the task with a pretty wide range of current-gen software. But the Deck isn’t the only portable we have at our disposal, so I decided to take out my Bazzite-equipped ROG Ally in its high TDP turbo mode and see if I could log any decent, playable results. Silent Hill 2 provides a good idea of the upper bounds here in terms of the performance differential, with around double the performance of the Deck. Space Marine 2 just cruises along, with performance usually hovering between 40fps to 50fps – even in intense sequences. Dragon’s Dogma 2 clocks a big uplift, from the low 20s on Steam Deck to the mid 30s on Ally. And STALKER 2 runs at a higher performance level with somewhat less obtrusive stutter, though it is the most variable of the games tested here. Keep in mind that we’re running both systems with Linux and Proton, so any differentials with the Steam Deck here should come down to raw hardware power and not because of any operating system divergence.
I think my big takeaway from this whole exercise is that more games than ever are a poor experience on Steam Deck. You really have to pick and choose: last-gen ports should mostly be OK, while a limited grouping of current-gen software pass muster, often by small margins. However, the reality is that ambitious current-gen titles often run very poorly, if they run at all. It’s no longer a reasonable assumption to think that the vast majority of games will be at least okay on Steam Deck, which was generally true earlier in the system’s lifecycle.
For a lot of games, we really need to see a generational uplift in Steam Deck capability – and there are some promising signs on the horizon. AMD’s Strix Halo can achieve excellent performance at TDPs that are similar to some portable gaming handhelds, and FSR 4 seems poised to greatly improve on FSR 2 and 3, which we tend to rely on heavily in Deck software. Perhaps a next generation device, packing an eight-core CPU, a meatier GPU and additional RAM and memory bandwidth could deliver transformative results in some of the titles we’ve surveyed today.
I think testing on the ROG Ally in turbo mode gives us some positive signs. There’s generally decent performance in the games I declared unplayable on the Steam Deck OLED. More demanding games seem to like the Ally in particular, especially with its much larger CPU. Meanwhile, the ROG Ally X offers a lot more memory to conquer the last spec point that can impact some games running on PC handhelds – Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora first and foremost amongst them.
For newer games, a Steam Deck 2-like device needs to come closer to a Series S-level spec, to reach that minimum most developers are aiming for this generation. Getting something like ROG Ally turbo performance at a reasonable TDP would be a good point to shoot for, especially if the screen resolution remains an easier-to-hit 800p or 720p. That’s the challenge for Valve going forward, and for any other OEMs operating in the PC handheld space. But for now, the outlook for running the latest games on the Valve handheld isn’t so rosy anymore. Unfortunately, a raft of modern PC games are indeed ‘too big’ for Steam Deck.
