Want to know how Starfield runs on Steam Deck? Or desktop Linux? Well, I've given it a run to see what I think of it and here's some early info for you.
TL;DR: if you get the latest proton then it does run, but performance is an issue. Can’t maintain 30fps, fps drops hard in some areas. Not really playable.
This has me worried as a non Steam Deck user (but a potential one) is the Deck going to keep up with newer AAA games? Or it will need constant revisions/updates?
I might be wrong but I heard of bad performance in good computers as well in the case of Starfield.
So yeah Deck will always have issues with certain new AAA because like the switch has a performance level of older hardware.
But not all new AAA require super hardware and also in PC there usually lots of settings official and non official to improve performance, usually in exchange of worse quality but sometimes fixing bugs that were slowing down the game unnecessary and without sideffects.
The reality is that the number of games, even AAA ones, that are releasing at that high a “minimum” performance requirement is incredibly small compared to other games that do release with more modest system requirements. Games that are “just good enough” graphically to go along with their gameplay tend to be the norm, I think, with the few games that really go for pushing visual fidelity being respectable in their own right but not frequent enough to fret about. What will matter the most is what games you want to play and what their requirements are, and that’s basically impossible to project out 1, 3, 5 years out or however long you expect the hardware to last.
For what it’s worth, I have a Steam Deck and spend a lot of time playing on it, but pretty much every “AAA, big budget => big graphics” game I want to play I’d exclusively do so on my gaming desktop (or remote play on Deck if I want to play it there at all), while sticking to 2D and lighter 3D games on the portable device directly. This is mostly due to what kinds of games I enjoy playing on what form factor, as for example my decision on what to play docked vs portable on the Switch is much the same way, and for about a year after buying the Deck, my desktop hardware was so out of date it was getting generally worse performance than the Deck yet I’d still use the desktop for “spectacle” games, but the necessary graphical quality to go along with that tends to correlate well.
TL;DR: if you get the latest proton then it does run, but performance is an issue. Can’t maintain 30fps, fps drops hard in some areas. Not really playable.
(From the article, I haven’t tried)
Bethesda games in the past have been pretty easy to mod past the lowest level of settings. I wonder if the same can be said for Starfield.
Either way with the Steam Deck’s popularity I could see lots of performance enhancing mods
Here’s one
This has me worried as a non Steam Deck user (but a potential one) is the Deck going to keep up with newer AAA games? Or it will need constant revisions/updates?
I might be wrong but I heard of bad performance in good computers as well in the case of Starfield.
So yeah Deck will always have issues with certain new AAA because like the switch has a performance level of older hardware. But not all new AAA require super hardware and also in PC there usually lots of settings official and non official to improve performance, usually in exchange of worse quality but sometimes fixing bugs that were slowing down the game unnecessary and without sideffects.
I have a 3080 with a 5900x at 1440p under arch and the game runs very poor, nowhere near as it should. It’s just not an optimized game.
The reality is that the number of games, even AAA ones, that are releasing at that high a “minimum” performance requirement is incredibly small compared to other games that do release with more modest system requirements. Games that are “just good enough” graphically to go along with their gameplay tend to be the norm, I think, with the few games that really go for pushing visual fidelity being respectable in their own right but not frequent enough to fret about. What will matter the most is what games you want to play and what their requirements are, and that’s basically impossible to project out 1, 3, 5 years out or however long you expect the hardware to last.
For what it’s worth, I have a Steam Deck and spend a lot of time playing on it, but pretty much every “AAA, big budget => big graphics” game I want to play I’d exclusively do so on my gaming desktop (or remote play on Deck if I want to play it there at all), while sticking to 2D and lighter 3D games on the portable device directly. This is mostly due to what kinds of games I enjoy playing on what form factor, as for example my decision on what to play docked vs portable on the Switch is much the same way, and for about a year after buying the Deck, my desktop hardware was so out of date it was getting generally worse performance than the Deck yet I’d still use the desktop for “spectacle” games, but the necessary graphical quality to go along with that tends to correlate well.