Surprise update doubles PlayStation game performance on Steam Deck
We’re not sure which parallel universe we’ve stepped into, but Sony appears to be giving its games some serious love on PC, with a new update doubling the performance of some of them on Steam Deck.
Developer Nixxes, responsible for building some of the best PC ports of PlayStation belters, has released an update for five of its games, bringing AMD’s Frame Generation technology into the fold. It’s similar tech to Nvidia’s Frame Generation tech that’s available with the 40 series cards, except this can be used on any GPU - most notably, the Steam Deck’s.
The games in question are Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and both the Marvel's Spider-Man games. Some of these titles already run admirably on Valve’s portable hardware, but the addition of frame generation has doubled frame rates in some cases.
I tested out Ghost of Tsushima on my Steam Deck OLED and was able to confirm that Nixxes has worked some sort of dark magic. On medium settings, the game pulls around 30fps in the open world. Enabling FSR 3.0, Frame Generation, and locking the GPU clock to 1600 Mhz doubles that performance to over 60fps, making for a much more enjoyable experience. There’s barely a lack of fidelity either, given the 7.2” screen is so small.
Similar performance gains have been reported across Ratchet and Clank and the Spider-Man games, with the latter now capable of running at an almost locked 90fps on the OLED model, provided you knock down a few of the detail settings.
The real winner in this scenario, though, is Horizon Forbidden West. This mammoth of an open-world RPG has always struggled to run properly on the Deck, as I noted in our guide at the time. With the introduction of Frame Generation, it’s now able to hold a very steady frame rate above 30fps, which for a massive open world running on a pocketable device is extremely admirable.
The holy grail of infinite performance?
Click to enlargeFrame Generation isn’t a magic pill that will provide us with infinite performance in games, though. There are a couple of trade-offs, including ghosting and input lag. Ghosting is where objects appear as though they’re being lightly smeared across your screen. It comes down to the individual user on how susceptible they are to these issues, and for most folks, it seems like they’re willing to put up with the negatives.
One user on the Steam Deck Reddit writes, “Dude I already played Spider-man and Miles Morales on deck at 40 fps with some frame dips when swinging. This was a year ago. I just reinstalled and put fsr3.1 on with frame gen and I am literally blown away. I can't believe not only the fps counter, but how fluid it is without noticeable input lag or ghosting.”
Another added, “It works surprisingly well on the SD with Ghost of Tsushima. The added input lag is the only drawback as the combat in that game gets a bit tricky with the lag.”
A couple of naysayers aren’t convinced, though, with one quipping, “If only anti-lag 2 was included with it”, and another saying, “Locked 40 fps will feel better than this every time.”
It’s clear that there’s still some work to do with getting Frame Generation technology running perfectly smoothly, but Nixxes implementations certainly seem like a promising step in the right direction. With AMD’s FSR tech baked into the Steam Deck at an OS level, there’s hope that we might even see Frame Generation get the same treatment later down the line - but time will tell with that one.
Still, if performance worries have been putting you off from playing one of the games above, now might be the time to give it another try!
