Valve’s portable console, the Steam Deck, is obviously no match for home consoles such as the PS5 or the Xbox Series X, and this performance difference is starting to be felt on the most recent games.
Oliver Mackenzie, journalist for Digital Foundry, has just published a report on the Steam Deck which reveals performance issues on some fairly recent titles. If the quad-core AMD Zen 2 APU (up to 3.5 Gz) and the RDNA 2 iGPU (equipped with 8 CUs running at up to 1.6 GHz) were enough to comfortably play most games at the console release last year, this is no longer really the case today.
Indeed, whether on The Callisto Protocol, The Witcher 3 Complete Edition or even Gotham Knights, the Steam Deck is visibly struggling to follow, since it is forced to use upscling technologies to achieve screen definition (1280 x 800 pixels).
Recent games have trouble running on the Steam Deck
On Plague Tale: Requiem, the reviewer finds that the console is able to display the game at 30 fps after upscaling from 720p, but all graphics were set to “low”. However, other games have a much harder time running on Valve’s portable console, despite the update that allows you to adjust the graphic options of each game.
This is for example the case of Gotham Knights, which despite the use of low visual quality settings and the FSR 2 in performance mode, regularly passed under 30 fps in the open world. On The Callisto Protocol, the reporter also found that the console was facing a CPU bottleneck issue that forced it to settle forabout 20 fps only, which is not enough to enjoy the game properly.
The most worrying thing is that the next generation of the console, Steam Deck 2, should not perform better than the current model. As games are bound to be more and more resource-intensive, this could therefore become a big problem over the next few years. For now, the solution remains to make sure that the title you want to play will run correctly on the console, thanks to a community site that allows you to visualize the result you can expect.