Valve's Steam Deck is a very capable handheld, capable of PS4-class visuals in a compact form factor. Packing a 1.6-teraflop GPU, modern quad-core CPU and plenty of memory bandwidth, the Deck can keep pace with a surprising array of current and last-gen software. Modern PC games get more demanding by the day though and 2023 releases in particular have suffered major performance woes - even on powerful machines. So can the Steam Deck still deliver playable performance in this year's most challenging software?
We're going to start off our exploration of 2023 titles with the Dead Space remake, a survival horror title that delivered impressive visuals when it launched back in January. But how does it hold up on Steam Deck?
As with so many games on Steam Deck, dialling in the right settings is key to a playable experience - but here the choices are at least straightforward, with the medium preset and low volumetrics producing 45-60fps when paired with FSR2 Ultra Performance mode, which scales from a 240p (!) internal resolution to a Deck-friendly 720p output resolution.