Final Fantasy XVI’s wobbly Steam Deck performance gets it a failing grade from Valve

rockpapershotgun.com:

Having gone to bed last night with Final Fantasy XVI installed yet unplayed on a Steam Deck, I awoke to find Valve have slapped the moody RPG with Unsupported status for the handheld. Its crime: an inability to "run well" on the Steam Deck’s internals, regardless of settings changes. Dammit, Clive.

I’ve given it a whirl myself this morning, and while a literal interpretation of "unsupported" arguably doesn’t apply to FFXVI – the Steam Deck can still launch and run it without detonating in one’s hands – it does ask a little too much of the hardware. The Low quality preset and FSR 3 on Ultra Performance is enough to keep me above 30fps in plenty of fights, but other areas will easily knock that down into the 20-25fps range, or even into the teens. Which ain’t particularly nice to play, even if you are still technically playing. FSR 3 can provide frame gen as well as upscaling, but this manages to make things worse, introducing heavy stuttering in exchange for only a tiny handful of extra generated frames.

(Strangely, nothing performs worse than the cutscenes, which I’ve repeatedly seen collapse to around the 17-20fps region for no clearly apparent reason. Though at least this pre-empts any potential annoyance about them also being capped at 30fps on PC.)

Also, and this isn’t part of Valve’s Steam Deck verification criteria but I can and will moan about it anyway: it’s a 152GB install. 152GB! So even if you decide the tough out the framerate dips, FFXVI is going to devour the lion’s share of any Steam Deck SSD or microSD card. 152GB, honestly. You could fit twelve copies of Dark Souls II in that. Or six Metal Gear Risings.

Incidentally, after Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, this makes it two Big Budget Action Games Where You Play a Grumpy Man With a Sword in a row that fall just short on Steam Deck performance. As for how Final Fantasy XVI’s new PC port takes to more traditional PC hardware, I’m currently locked in the benchmark dungeon trying to find out, though I