Ultimate Fantasy XVI is tough on Steam Deck, however it has potential

A shock demo simply dropped for Ultimate 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 trustworthy: it’s not nice, however with a little bit little bit of devoted optimization, it will earn Steam Deck Verification.

Regardless of being the perfect handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck is now struggling towards lots of its rivals when it comes to energy. The Asus ROG Ally X vastly outperforms Valve’s moveable, however it additionally comes at a significantly greater MSRP. In video games like Ultimate Fantasy XVI, the facility hole turns into painfully clear, however it’s not all doom and gloom for the Deck.

Throughout my hour spent with the Ultimate Fantasy XVI demo on the Steam Deck OLED, I discovered that efficiency was at its finest with AMD FSR 3 enabled, however body era wanted to be disabled. All different settings are at their lowest, as anticipated, and this returned a mean of 31fps.

The difficulty is that the sport doesn’t look too fairly in movement. There’s seen blurring across the edges of character fashions and surroundings, and that is all the way down to the dynamic decision scaling choice being on by default. Disabling this and deciding on the High quality setting improved the picture high quality, however dropped the typical fps to 26.

Ultimate 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 modifications, it’s onerous to recommend any additional amendments based mostly on my time with the sport. Whereas that 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 on condition that we’re nonetheless weeks out from launch.

Within the time between now and the Ultimate Fantasy XVI PC launch date, additional optimizations may be made, in addition to within the post-release window, to enhance efficiency on Valve’s handheld. It’s not a straightforward activity by any means, however it’s very doable that FFXVI might find yourself with the coveted inexperienced tick of approval from Valve.

Within the meantime, take a look at the Ultimate Fantasy XVI system necessities to get an thought of how the sport will carry out in your gaming PC.