“After dozens of hours on just Steam Deck, Starfield feels good in some parts, but really struggles in the bigger cities. Turning everything to low and enabling FSR2 is basically the only way to play it right now on Valve’s handheld, and even that drops to 20fps often in the first major city (New Atlantis). The game itself can look very good on the device screen in many parts, but it is very CPU-heavy right now. This has been tested after the day one patch as well.”
Yeah. I love my deck, but I’m realistic that it’s not going to run Starfield lol.
You beat me to it. The Deck is great but we have to be realistic about the limits of the hardware.
It’s not like it gets to break the rules because it’s popular!
My Steamdeck is crushing anything released prior to 2020, but it’s chugging on Baldurs Gate 3. Barring the ability to turn the graphics settings waaaaay down, I don’t see myself playing this on anything but my desktop.
I got bg3 acceptable to me and love it on steam deck. Maybe I have low standards though
Yep lol same with mine. BG3 is a little wonky in parts and I haven’t reached Act 3 yet. I’m almost there, so I hope the patch has fixed it for the Deck.
struggles in cities
It makes a ton of sense: the Steam Deck is memory bandwidth limited.
You can overclock the CPU and you get a few FPS extra on some games. You overclock the memory (which only works in models with non-Samsung memory) and the performance gains can be in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 FPS.
Though the GPU is for sure a big limitation, it could offer way more consistency if paired with even faster memory. Cities and other areas filled with multiple moving models are perfect scenarios to demonstrate memory pressure.
One tiny way one can help is reducing or outright disabling anisotropic filtering. We take it for granted on desktop CPUs, we can push it to 16x and not notice a single FPS drop - however, it’s extremely reliant on memory bandwidth so on a device like the Steam Deck forcing it off can help tremendously with 1% lows.
I think it speaks to the power of the Steam Deck that Starfield can even run at all, I certainly wasn’t expecting that.
