Steam Deck testing shows it stumbles with demanding PC games – but that doesn’t matter
The Steam Deck has had its performance tested with a bunch of more demanding games, with the handheld acquitting itself reasonably well, overall – with some caveats as you might expect.
Digital Foundry(opens in new tab) (via Tom’s Hardware(opens in new tab)) conducted this round of testing, putting the Steam Deck through its paces with some of the more challenging PC games around including the likes of A Plague Tale: Requiem, Gotham Knights, and more.
A Plague Tale: Requiem looks fantastic, and is a tough cookie to handle for both GPU and moreover the CPU, which is perhaps why the Steam Deck struggles somewhat. Digital Foundry picked it for this stressful nature, of course, and noted that all graphics settings had to be pushed to their lowest level (save for texture resolution), and the game was run at an upsampled 720p (from more like 360p).
The net effect was still a reasonable-looking game, albeit with some omissions (like low-quality foliage, and indeed a pretty close draw distance) and visual glitches, and 30 frames per second (fps) was mostly achieved – just not without stuttering in places, particularly in more heavily populated locations. (The game’s notorious for this, though, even with full PC setups there’ll be stutter in some areas).
Gotham Knights is in a similar category, with inherent performance issues, and it’s a game that puts some serious stress on the CPU. Even when dropping all the graphics settings down, Digital Foundry observed the game being well short of 30 fps in open-world areas, with plentiful stutter making itself evident.
This isn’t a good experience on the Steam Deck, then, but as mentioned, there are broader performance (and stability) issues with Gotham Knights, so it was always going to be a
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