A shock demo simply dropped for Closing Fantasy XVI on PC, and I couldn’t assist however obtain it on my Steam Deck to see what form the sport is in. I’ll be sincere: it’s not nice, however with a bit of little bit of devoted optimization, it will earn Steam Deck Verification.
Regardless of being one of the best handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck is now struggling in opposition to a lot of its rivals when it comes to energy. The Asus ROG Ally X vastly outperforms Valve’s moveable, nevertheless it additionally comes at a significantly increased MSRP. In video games like Closing Fantasy XVI, the ability hole turns into painfully clear, nevertheless it’s not all doom and gloom for the Deck.
Throughout my hour spent with the Closing Fantasy XVI demo on the Steam Deck OLED, I discovered that efficiency was at its finest with AMD FSR 3 enabled, however body technology wanted to be disabled. All different settings are at their lowest, as anticipated, and this returned a mean of 31fps.
The problem is that the sport doesn’t look too fairly in movement. There may be seen blurring across the edges of character fashions and surroundings, and that is right down to the dynamic decision scaling possibility being on by default. Disabling this and choosing the High quality setting improved the picture high quality, however dropped the common fps to 26.
Closing Fantasy XVI additionally doesn’t auto-detect the Steam Deck’s show decision and forces the windowed show mode and 720p by default. This may be modified to borderless and thus permits an 800p decision, which is finest for the Deck.
Outdoors of those adjustments, it’s arduous to counsel any additional amendments based mostly on my time with the sport. Whereas which will sound like I’m giving up, that’s removed from the reality. Getting the efficiency I did out of the Steam Deck is an absolute constructive provided that we’re nonetheless weeks out from launch.
Within the time between now and the Closing Fantasy XVI PC launch date, additional optimizations could be made, in addition to within the post-release window, to enhance efficiency on Valve’s handheld. It’s not a straightforward process by any means, nevertheless it’s very attainable that FFXVI could find yourself with the coveted inexperienced tick of approval from Valve.
Within the meantime, take a look at the Closing Fantasy XVI system necessities to get an concept of how the sport will carry out in your gaming PC.