Here's how Starfield runs on Steam Deck and desktop Linux
Here's how Starfield runs on Steam Deck and desktop Linux
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.
(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
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 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.
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, but the necessary graphical quality to go along with that tends to correlate well.
I have it running on deck and it's not that bad really, locked in at 45fps, though it does dip heavily in busy places. Runs much better on my main amd rig though.
There’s a mod that supposedly helps performance on Steam Deck, have you tried it?
Not yet, will do though.
Seems it’s worse if you have nvidia (for Linux desktop) cause apparently they didn’t fund the project for optimization. So even great cards are struggling I heard. My 1080Ti won’t even start it. Finally an end of an era. I had to refund. I do have a steam deck but it doesn’t seem worth it to get starfield on it
AMD cards can use latest mesa driver to get it work though.
From reading the github for proton it looks like there a good number of bugs in the latest drivers. Pwople have had success running with older driver but ahit performance.
Im running in proton with experimental on a 6700xt on high and have no issues at all. I dis have to install newer vulkan driver ppa. Ibuntu base drivers are old
not impressive, but basically the game itself optimization side is unimpressive. Like liam said, i hope with performance patches it would be better on deck!
I don’t really care much about FPS on the Deck. It is what it is and I’m cool with that. The only negative I have is the textures are ass.
Permanently Deleted
Sure enough I can surprisingly get a good number of settings up to medium and got textures back without impacting my experience.
It’s just give or take with performance. I’m sacrificing getting low frame rates in city’s to get way better textures when going though bases. So on the deck I’m exploring the areas it performs well at and I’ll do all the city quests on my PC after a GPU upgrade.
Looks like there is a bug that makes this game unstable on some kernels (like in default Ubuntu):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/2034718I was so surprised to have this running day one, just had to switch to proton hotfix and it was off to the races!