[Obsolete] Steam Deck Performance and Stability Notes

Hey All,

I know this was a dream but I tried it on my Steam deck with no luck. I managed to get it running by putting settings low and capping it at 30 fps but I get about ten minutes into the game and it freezes.

I have had two issues, one major issue and the other was a small one. The small issue is I was cooking food at a campfire in a cave, leveled up while seated and I couldn’t move after that. Had to reload the game and I could move again.

The major issue is as follows: Ever since patch 2(even into three) my game freezes after 10-20 min of playing on my steam deck. The entire system freezes up and I have to hard shutdown the console. I tried playing a few other games over the past few days and none of them are freezing up the system. (Ori:WotW, Hollow Knight, cyberpunk 2077) I’ll notice some lag, then the game will freeze entirely a min or so later when the lag starts.

Good afternoon! Every time you release a hotfix on Steam Deck at the moment of installing the game with the update - it intentionally hangs. After restarting writes not found installation files.

So every time I update, I have to uninstall the game and install it again. There is enough disk space, Steam Deck OLED. Am I the only one? Or does anyone have this happen?

After 2 last patches the game crashes which makes steam deck freeze and force you to shutdown deck manually.
Image is the moment when deck freezes.

Thank you beforehand for looking into this issue.

1 Like

Hello dev team !

Quick flag to the dev team here - it seems like now that the game is quite unstable on the Steam deck. Not able to pass the prologue anymore , as soon as Odessa finish her speech on the boat before crashing , I end up having the game to freeze my steam deck. Tried 4/5 times to give it a try as best I could but It won’t work anymore.

I won’t be able to test this further as I don’t really like to hard reboot my deck many times in a row.
Hope this feedback will reach you.
Thanks all for the great involvement in getting the experience better and better !
Really hope we could one day have a " steam deck " graphic setting :slight_smile:

Best

By chance did you happen to have the performance overlay active when playing.

Hello,

No I was using the balanced graphic settings , since the performance one was getting the image a bit too blurry for me .
Would you suggest for now to exclusively use the performance mode only for the Steam deck ?

Balance is fine. Performance for the Deck is still work in progress.

Sounds good thank you - here it sounds more like a bug than a performance issue. The prologue in the boat was running ok using Balance mode , but it doesn’t let me pass it , I always have my deck crashing when the prologue is done.

Yeah, as of right now the deck shares its ram/vram in the 16gb, So ram is the main issue atm.

I currently have my VRAM set to 4Go , would you suggest for now to lower it and preserve more actual RAM to at least avoid the crashes ?

best person to ask is Rincewind in the Steamdeck chat, very knowledgeable on the deck and its best settings.

ok that was a link to the steamdeck chat in discord but some reason isnt going through. What is your discord name.

My discord name is hefka66

  • Rig: Steam Deck LCD with SteamOS 3.6
  • Settings: Resolution set to 1280x720. Performance preset with FSR set to Performance. Motion blur set to 0%. Dynamic resolution scaling on with a target of 60 FPS. Frame rate capped to 30 FPS using the “Display” tab with V-sync off and the deck itself set to a 60 Hz refresh rate.
  • Version: All of this feedback is based on the most recent version of the game as of writing this, Patch 2.

I get 30 FPS with minor drops in most areas most of the time. However, there is a pattern I’ve seen where areas with a lot of sunlight from sunny weather tend to run sluggishly with FPS in the 20-25 range. This effect has occurred to me on the beach, in the glades, and in Sacrament, with the common denominator being sunny weather with shining reflections.

I’ve had no crashes so far, and I think I can thank the improved memory management of SteamOS 3.6 for that. However, assets (including bridges) are often invisible for a while when entering a new area, and abruptly pop in after maybe 10 seconds or so.

I’ve also encountered what I assume is a bug when choosing to “Quit to Desktop” from the game. The game fades to black, but hangs and doesn’t seem to quit, and I have to manually force the game to stop using SteamOS. This doesn’t seem to happen every time, buts it’s happened 2-3 times, so enough that it might be an issue worth looking into.