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This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels. But the Deck is limited in ha

by thefz 1y ago

This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels. But the Deck is limited in hardware. It makes sense that it has some difficulties running gigantic games and is more aimed towards simpler games. In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging 400w.
- KeplerBoy 1y ago
  It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity. Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
  - fendy3002 1y ago
    Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring controller support since it's a separate matter).
    - secabeen 1y ago
      MH: World runs fine, but MH: Wilds does not, so it's right at the edge.
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    Portal RTX might not be possible on that hardware without some severe compromises. But then again, RTX is pretty much Brute Force: The Renderer
    - jon-wood 1y ago
      Portal RTX isn’t a new game, its Portal on supermax settings, so the original point on making sure low settings work still stands.
      - LoganDark 1y ago
        It's not just Portal on any settings. Portal RTX uses a completely different rendering engine to reimplement Portal's visuals using full path tracing.
  - teamonkey 1y ago
    I think you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses. The 360/PS3 was a huge jump forward but very limited by today’s standards. RDR was one of the better looking games of the generation but could not maintain a steady 30fps at 1080p/i (and I’m not sure it was even true 1080). The PC version came later, had higher resolution textures and other graphical improvements so it compares more favourably to modern games when you play it today. It still had problems running on all but the highest-end PCs of the time. Of course even low-end PCs can run it without breaking a sweat, because they’ve become much more powerful.
    - flohofwoe 1y ago
      Most Xbox360 and PS3 games were 720p at 30fps. 720p was mostly fine because 1080p TVs were luxury items back then. The performance problems in modern games are often not caused by fillrate-vs-resolution bottlenecks though, but by poor engine architecture decisions (triggering shader recompilations in the hot path).
      - teamonkey 1y ago
        Shader recompilation causes stuttering not general performance problems. Shader complexity will though, which is a function of render quality. But I’m confused about why you think fill rate isn’t an issue? If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K your GPU needs at the very least 4x the pixel pushing power and even then that’s only to maintain the same detail; you bought a 4K screen for more detail.
        everdrive 1y ago
        > If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K Presumably people do this because they hate money; as you say, it's much harder to make the pixels just slightly more crisp and you'll pay dearly for the privilege.
        teamonkey 1y ago
        I think people do it because they want the best quality but they underestimate how much compute power is needed to drive it properly.
  - dahauns 1y ago
    Yeah, sure...I'd like to see something like MSFS2024 or BeamNG.drive running on a PS3.
  - izacus 1y ago
    Cyberpunk 2077 proved that one wrong very easily :D
    - TheCapeGreek 1y ago
      I tried CP2077's Deck mode but it really seemed like a tech demo level of "you could do this if you really wanted to" more than it actually being playable. The game felt like it had significant input lag, and at 720p with upscaling text becomes very hard to read. The game's visual style of "glitch" effects also translates badly with upscaling and I really had a tough time actually understanding what I'm looking at on the screen. Perhaps the situation is better on OLED.
      - izacus 1y ago
        Yeah, and famously CP2077 isn't really playable on PS4 and Xbox One era hardware. Even HDD equipped machines need to downgrade the streaming. The game on new machines is quite impressive, quite unlike anything else made.
        TheCapeGreek 1y ago
        I've had a great experience with the game even at 4K on a 3060 desktop, I just didn't find it workable on the Deck.
      - goosedragons 1y ago
        I thought it was playable on the LCD Deck. I did turn things down below what the Steam Deck preset was at. It certainly wasn't the smoothest 100% of the time but it was better than Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 IMO. It still holds up pretty well against the Switch 2 version in handheld mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag
      - rpdillon 1y ago
        Played and beat on an OLED deck, twice. Extremely playable. 30fps or higher almost all the time, handheld and docked work great. It's the #10 top most played game on Steam Deck. https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed
- piltdownman 1y ago
  The problem is how horribly unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 itself is - with that sort of foundation there's not a lot you can do. It's a GTX-1050 equivalent GPU, there's only so much that can be expected of it.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    UE has always been a damn huge toolbox. Yes, sure, you can just cobble together all sort of libraries and get a visually very appealing game or, if you want, photorealistic rendering decent enough to back these giant virtual studios for triple-A blockbuster movies, but you will need the hardware to match if you want performance. If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no way (and I'd say this holds true for any engine, not just UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries and invest the money in testing to tune the performance appropriately.
    - teamonkey 1y ago
      To make the point, if you turn the next-gen Nanite and Lumen features off, UE5 will typically be faster (more optimised!) than UE4. And don’t get me wrong, those features are great, but they’re not intended for low-end hardware or where fps is a priority.
    - izacus 1y ago
      When EVERY game stutters and has the same kind of issues, then you can't put a blame on individual developers. This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        > This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing. Just because an engine offers you a way to shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun, you can't blame the engine maker when you do shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun and end up with a bleeding ugly stump. The thing is, of course game studios will go for "we want to use ALLLLLL the newest features, we want to show off with Nanite and god knows what else". Who wouldn't? But game studios aren't willing to put in the effort surrounding such an implementation to properly tune it. And it's not just tuning engine components for what it's worth - often enough the culprit ends up being ridiculously oversized textures, there's nothing else that could cause dozens of gigabytes worth of patches [1], and it's not a new complaint either [2]. [1] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-ridiculous-patch-sizes.1503703/ https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-r... [2] https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becoming-excessive.396399/ https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becom...
- Perz1val 1y ago
  It has limited performance, but it is also very limited by the display resolution, so it kind of cancels out
- KronisLV 1y ago
  Or in the case of Borderlands 4 and a plethora of other Unreal Engine 5 titles: they’re optimized for nothing and there aren’t even options to turn off most of the expensive graphical effects, despite the engine being able to scale down to mobile devices.
  - izacus 1y ago
    Yeah, UE5 games don't even run well on 5090s these days -_-
    - KronisLV 1y ago
      For anyone doubting this, here's some receipts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M This is absolutely unacceptable and if this happens with nearly every big release, then that also speaks badly of the engine itself. Similarly to how languages like C++ are very powerful and can be used to great effect... and people almost inevitably still write code that has memory safety issues. That comparison should make a few ears perk up, my point is that fewer developers should use Unreal Engine 5 if they can't use it well (same as with the languages). Frankly, I place more trust in studios that have their own engines or use literally anything other than UE5, like what happened to KDC:2, a modern game that looks good and runs great across a wide variety of hardware. Or how they fixed Cyberpunk 2077, it took a while to get there but now both the visuals and performance are quite good across the board.
    - sleepybrett 1y ago
      I can't imagine how shit space marine 2 would run if it was built on ue5.
- energy123 1y ago
  That's true for GPU bound games but with CPU bound games like BG3 in Act 3 there's no easy toggle on the user side, and often no easy toggle on the dev side either, because the nature of the game necessitates CPU intensive work.
- LaGrange 1y ago
  Yeah. I just ran Goblin Cleanup, Mars First Logistics and Peak on a Framework 12 - that’s an intel integrated gpu. They all ran fine. Just a solid reminder that you can actually make a fun and good looking game without asking the player to spend hundreds to thousands of euros on future land waste.
WithinReason 1y ago
BG3 runs well on the steam deck, you can even run it in 1080 at 30 FPS which is sufficient for this type of game.
- adammarples 1y ago
  From what I've heard it really struggles when you get to Baldur's Gate itself. Which I haven't got to yet :)
nicce 1y ago
I would imagine this update tranfers to general Linux well? Not a small thing.
- jansommer 1y ago
  Already runs smooth on Linux (Wine)
  - Podrod 1y ago
    Or just Proton
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - nicce 1y ago
    Yes, but native is always native.
    - gambiting 1y ago
      Native doesn't automatically mean better - quite a few examples of games running better on proton than with native executables(and yes then we can start arguing that it just means the native port is done poorly, but I'm just saying don't assume native will always run better).
      - keyringlight 1y ago
        It seems like a similar argument around the popularity of third party engines, whether studios should use Unreal, or whether they have the expertise/resources to change to and use another engine, or make their own bespoke engine, and if that will produce better results.
        nicce 1y ago
        I think that is not fair comparison. Proton adds additional layer which can be completely removed and affects the runtime performance. Switching different game engine changes the layer implementation, instead of removing.
realprimoh 1y ago
Agree this is great from Larian. Though BG3 does run fine on Steam Deck as it is, especially for such a large game.
sReinwald 1y ago
> This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels. What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture. Swen Vincke shared the backstory: > The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out! https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969 https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969 That combination of individual passion and company willingness to back good ideas is what makes Larian special.
- andruby 1y ago
  Do they name the engineer somewhere in the public messages? Super glad the company recognized the value and supported the release!
  - sReinwald 1y ago
    Not that I'm aware of. I thought that was weird at first as well, but I assume it might be in a way to protect the engineer. Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online. By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while shielding them from becoming a public target. This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy" at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people who mistake their personal social media accounts for a support ticket. I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and thoughtful leadership.
poulpy123 1y ago
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. Because they bought the game. After decades of PC gaming, it's totally absurd there is no system that tell you how bad or how well a game is going to play on your system. And if it's too difficult to make, how can we expect regular people to know themselves ?
- GreenWatermelon 1y ago
  Steam literally has a section called Hardware Requirements under every game.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    Yes, they are entirely arbitrary. Worst cases (e.g. Cities Skylines 2) outright false
    - sensanaty 1y ago
      To be fair that's on the devs/publishers, not Steam
  - Jolter 1y ago
    As soon as what you have in your machine doesn’t literally match the stated system requirements, you’re on your own. It’s up to the user to research and understand which CPU or GPU is ”better” or ”worse” than the required one. These things are nontrivial when comparing between generations and across tiers, not to mention across different vendors. A knowledgeable user might be able to predict their performance reasonably well, based on publicly available benchmark databases, but you still can’t really get a good estimate FPS unless you find someone with exactly your hardware setup who benchmarked the game (and is willing to share).
    - bavell 1y ago
      Most minimum/recommended game specs reference mainstream gaming CPU/GPUs, and most gamers know the strength of their own hardware relative to mainstream components. If you're a very casual/young/inexperienced gamer then sure, you might have trouble comparing your own system with the min specs.
Arch-TK 1y ago
The steam deck happily provides an enjoyable experience running Cyberpunk 2077. It's limited, but the limitations in a large part cancel out. It's still very capable.
nottorp 1y ago
> when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings It's because most of those games don't have the graphics to justify choking. On lower end hardware it's extremely easy to notice who actually programmed the game and who just used the Unity defaults.
bsza 1y ago
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. Depends on what the game can be reasonably expected to run on. Most games don't even approximate what would be technically possible on today's hardware and waste your electricity on lazy coding instead. "15 years old hardware" is what was cutting edge when Crysis 2 and Skyrim came out, so that's not a good excuse in the majority of cases.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
The part of BG3 that was not in early access runs like shit even on the most powerful pc's
KolibriFly 1y ago
As for the Deck... it's not a powerhouse, but it's still impressive how much it can run with decent tweaks. BG3 on a handheld at all feels like sci-fi to my teenage self
array_key_first 1y ago
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry. A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance. Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes. Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them. The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.
- suncore 1y ago
  There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine with baked lighting.
  - array_key_first 1y ago
    There's also much cheaper methods of dynamic lighting that aren't real time ray tracing. You can approximate, you can cheat, and it will look almost as good.
jmuguy 1y ago
The only thing that seems to unite gamers is whining about basically every aspect of gaming, hardware requirements included.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. I game on 1080P and never have issues with any games I play, though I am on a 3080. It's definitely people trying to max out every setting for their 4K monitor that they overpaid for. I might be giving 2K monitors a try soon on the other hand.
foresto 1y ago
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. 15 years old? Have you seen many examples of this (I have not) or are you exaggerating to make a point? Regardless, some very popular gaming hardware from 10-12 years ago is still in use and still very capable in modern games, so long as they allow tuning the graphics down. People running an i5 3570K and RX 480 at 1080p don't generally expect to get the imagery or frame rates of a modern gaming rig, but they are reasonable to expect roughly 60 fps with (for example) low textures and shadow detail, no reflections, static lighting, etc. Perhaps this is what you meant by "minimum settings", but: While low-spec options like this have been the norm in 3D PC games practically forever, several very popular games released in the past 5 years have adopted anemic options menus that have negligible impact on performance at the low end. To someone with much experience tuning for older hardware, this is a striking and disappointing change. Especially now that gaming hardware upgrades are far more expensive than they were, and more people are struggling just to pay their living expenses. The change is almost certainly unnecessary. It smells like the developers just aren't putting any effort into it anymore. And it's not merely disappointing; it's also wasteful, both by pushing older hardware into the landfill and by denying opportunities to reduce power consumption.

by thefz 1y ago

SchemaLoad 1y ago

The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging 400w.

KeplerBoy 1y ago
It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity. Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
- fendy3002 1y ago
  Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring controller support since it's a separate matter).
  - secabeen 1y ago
    MH: World runs fine, but MH: Wilds does not, so it's right at the edge.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  Portal RTX might not be possible on that hardware without some severe compromises. But then again, RTX is pretty much Brute Force: The Renderer
  - jon-wood 1y ago
    Portal RTX isn’t a new game, its Portal on supermax settings, so the original point on making sure low settings work still stands.
    - LoganDark 1y ago
      It's not just Portal on any settings. Portal RTX uses a completely different rendering engine to reimplement Portal's visuals using full path tracing.
- teamonkey 1y ago
  I think you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses. The 360/PS3 was a huge jump forward but very limited by today’s standards. RDR was one of the better looking games of the generation but could not maintain a steady 30fps at 1080p/i (and I’m not sure it was even true 1080). The PC version came later, had higher resolution textures and other graphical improvements so it compares more favourably to modern games when you play it today. It still had problems running on all but the highest-end PCs of the time. Of course even low-end PCs can run it without breaking a sweat, because they’ve become much more powerful.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    Most Xbox360 and PS3 games were 720p at 30fps. 720p was mostly fine because 1080p TVs were luxury items back then. The performance problems in modern games are often not caused by fillrate-vs-resolution bottlenecks though, but by poor engine architecture decisions (triggering shader recompilations in the hot path).
    - teamonkey 1y ago
      Shader recompilation causes stuttering not general performance problems. Shader complexity will though, which is a function of render quality. But I’m confused about why you think fill rate isn’t an issue? If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K your GPU needs at the very least 4x the pixel pushing power and even then that’s only to maintain the same detail; you bought a 4K screen for more detail.
      - everdrive 1y ago
        > If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K Presumably people do this because they hate money; as you say, it's much harder to make the pixels just slightly more crisp and you'll pay dearly for the privilege.
        teamonkey 1y ago
        I think people do it because they want the best quality but they underestimate how much compute power is needed to drive it properly.
- dahauns 1y ago
  Yeah, sure...I'd like to see something like MSFS2024 or BeamNG.drive running on a PS3.
- izacus 1y ago
  Cyberpunk 2077 proved that one wrong very easily :D
  - TheCapeGreek 1y ago
    I tried CP2077's Deck mode but it really seemed like a tech demo level of "you could do this if you really wanted to" more than it actually being playable. The game felt like it had significant input lag, and at 720p with upscaling text becomes very hard to read. The game's visual style of "glitch" effects also translates badly with upscaling and I really had a tough time actually understanding what I'm looking at on the screen. Perhaps the situation is better on OLED.
    - izacus 1y ago
      Yeah, and famously CP2077 isn't really playable on PS4 and Xbox One era hardware. Even HDD equipped machines need to downgrade the streaming. The game on new machines is quite impressive, quite unlike anything else made.
      - TheCapeGreek 1y ago
        I've had a great experience with the game even at 4K on a 3060 desktop, I just didn't find it workable on the Deck.
    - goosedragons 1y ago
      I thought it was playable on the LCD Deck. I did turn things down below what the Steam Deck preset was at. It certainly wasn't the smoothest 100% of the time but it was better than Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 IMO. It still holds up pretty well against the Switch 2 version in handheld mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      Played and beat on an OLED deck, twice. Extremely playable. 30fps or higher almost all the time, handheld and docked work great. It's the #10 top most played game on Steam Deck. https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed
piltdownman 1y ago
The problem is how horribly unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 itself is - with that sort of foundation there's not a lot you can do. It's a GTX-1050 equivalent GPU, there's only so much that can be expected of it.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  UE has always been a damn huge toolbox. Yes, sure, you can just cobble together all sort of libraries and get a visually very appealing game or, if you want, photorealistic rendering decent enough to back these giant virtual studios for triple-A blockbuster movies, but you will need the hardware to match if you want performance. If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no way (and I'd say this holds true for any engine, not just UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries and invest the money in testing to tune the performance appropriately.
  - teamonkey 1y ago
    To make the point, if you turn the next-gen Nanite and Lumen features off, UE5 will typically be faster (more optimised!) than UE4. And don’t get me wrong, those features are great, but they’re not intended for low-end hardware or where fps is a priority.
  - izacus 1y ago
    When EVERY game stutters and has the same kind of issues, then you can't put a blame on individual developers. This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing. Just because an engine offers you a way to shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun, you can't blame the engine maker when you do shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun and end up with a bleeding ugly stump. The thing is, of course game studios will go for "we want to use ALLLLLL the newest features, we want to show off with Nanite and god knows what else". Who wouldn't? But game studios aren't willing to put in the effort surrounding such an implementation to properly tune it. And it's not just tuning engine components for what it's worth - often enough the culprit ends up being ridiculously oversized textures, there's nothing else that could cause dozens of gigabytes worth of patches [1], and it's not a new complaint either [2]. [1] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-ridiculous-patch-sizes.1503703/ https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-r... [2] https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becoming-excessive.396399/ https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becom...
Perz1val 1y ago
It has limited performance, but it is also very limited by the display resolution, so it kind of cancels out
KronisLV 1y ago
Or in the case of Borderlands 4 and a plethora of other Unreal Engine 5 titles: they’re optimized for nothing and there aren’t even options to turn off most of the expensive graphical effects, despite the engine being able to scale down to mobile devices.
- izacus 1y ago
  Yeah, UE5 games don't even run well on 5090s these days -_-
  - KronisLV 1y ago
    For anyone doubting this, here's some receipts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M This is absolutely unacceptable and if this happens with nearly every big release, then that also speaks badly of the engine itself. Similarly to how languages like C++ are very powerful and can be used to great effect... and people almost inevitably still write code that has memory safety issues. That comparison should make a few ears perk up, my point is that fewer developers should use Unreal Engine 5 if they can't use it well (same as with the languages). Frankly, I place more trust in studios that have their own engines or use literally anything other than UE5, like what happened to KDC:2, a modern game that looks good and runs great across a wide variety of hardware. Or how they fixed Cyberpunk 2077, it took a while to get there but now both the visuals and performance are quite good across the board.
  - sleepybrett 1y ago
    I can't imagine how shit space marine 2 would run if it was built on ue5.
energy123 1y ago
That's true for GPU bound games but with CPU bound games like BG3 in Act 3 there's no easy toggle on the user side, and often no easy toggle on the dev side either, because the nature of the game necessitates CPU intensive work.
LaGrange 1y ago
Yeah. I just ran Goblin Cleanup, Mars First Logistics and Peak on a Framework 12 - that’s an intel integrated gpu. They all ran fine. Just a solid reminder that you can actually make a fun and good looking game without asking the player to spend hundreds to thousands of euros on future land waste.

WithinReason 1y ago

BG3 runs well on the steam deck, you can even run it in 1080 at 30 FPS which is sufficient for this type of game.

adammarples 1y ago
From what I've heard it really struggles when you get to Baldur's Gate itself. Which I haven't got to yet :)

nicce 1y ago

I would imagine this update tranfers to general Linux well? Not a small thing.

jansommer 1y ago
Already runs smooth on Linux (Wine)
- Podrod 1y ago
  Or just Proton
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- nicce 1y ago
  Yes, but native is always native.
  - gambiting 1y ago
    Native doesn't automatically mean better - quite a few examples of games running better on proton than with native executables(and yes then we can start arguing that it just means the native port is done poorly, but I'm just saying don't assume native will always run better).
    - keyringlight 1y ago
      It seems like a similar argument around the popularity of third party engines, whether studios should use Unreal, or whether they have the expertise/resources to change to and use another engine, or make their own bespoke engine, and if that will produce better results.
      - nicce 1y ago
        I think that is not fair comparison. Proton adds additional layer which can be completely removed and affects the runtime performance. Switching different game engine changes the layer implementation, instead of removing.

realprimoh 1y ago

Agree this is great from Larian. Though BG3 does run fine on Steam Deck as it is, especially for such a large game.

sReinwald 1y ago

> This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels. What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture. Swen Vincke shared the backstory: > The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out! https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969 https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969 That combination of individual passion and company willingness to back good ideas is what makes Larian special.

andruby 1y ago
Do they name the engineer somewhere in the public messages? Super glad the company recognized the value and supported the release!
- sReinwald 1y ago
  Not that I'm aware of. I thought that was weird at first as well, but I assume it might be in a way to protect the engineer. Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online. By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while shielding them from becoming a public target. This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy" at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people who mistake their personal social media accounts for a support ticket. I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and thoughtful leadership.

poulpy123 1y ago

> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. Because they bought the game. After decades of PC gaming, it's totally absurd there is no system that tell you how bad or how well a game is going to play on your system. And if it's too difficult to make, how can we expect regular people to know themselves ?

GreenWatermelon 1y ago
Steam literally has a section called Hardware Requirements under every game.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  Yes, they are entirely arbitrary. Worst cases (e.g. Cities Skylines 2) outright false
  - sensanaty 1y ago
    To be fair that's on the devs/publishers, not Steam
- Jolter 1y ago
  As soon as what you have in your machine doesn’t literally match the stated system requirements, you’re on your own. It’s up to the user to research and understand which CPU or GPU is ”better” or ”worse” than the required one. These things are nontrivial when comparing between generations and across tiers, not to mention across different vendors. A knowledgeable user might be able to predict their performance reasonably well, based on publicly available benchmark databases, but you still can’t really get a good estimate FPS unless you find someone with exactly your hardware setup who benchmarked the game (and is willing to share).
  - bavell 1y ago
    Most minimum/recommended game specs reference mainstream gaming CPU/GPUs, and most gamers know the strength of their own hardware relative to mainstream components. If you're a very casual/young/inexperienced gamer then sure, you might have trouble comparing your own system with the min specs.

Arch-TK 1y ago

The steam deck happily provides an enjoyable experience running Cyberpunk 2077. It's limited, but the limitations in a large part cancel out. It's still very capable.

nottorp 1y ago

> when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings It's because most of those games don't have the graphics to justify choking. On lower end hardware it's extremely easy to notice who actually programmed the game and who just used the Unity defaults.

bsza 1y ago

> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. Depends on what the game can be reasonably expected to run on. Most games don't even approximate what would be technically possible on today's hardware and waste your electricity on lazy coding instead. "15 years old hardware" is what was cutting edge when Crysis 2 and Skyrim came out, so that's not a good excuse in the majority of cases.

TiredOfLife 1y ago

The part of BG3 that was not in early access runs like shit even on the most powerful pc's

KolibriFly 1y ago

As for the Deck... it's not a powerhouse, but it's still impressive how much it can run with decent tweaks. BG3 on a handheld at all feels like sci-fi to my teenage self

array_key_first 1y ago

> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry. A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance. Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes. Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them. The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.

suncore 1y ago
There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine with baked lighting.
- array_key_first 1y ago
  There's also much cheaper methods of dynamic lighting that aren't real time ray tracing. You can approximate, you can cheat, and it will look almost as good.

jmuguy 1y ago

The only thing that seems to unite gamers is whining about basically every aspect of gaming, hardware requirements included.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. I game on 1080P and never have issues with any games I play, though I am on a 3080. It's definitely people trying to max out every setting for their 4K monitor that they overpaid for. I might be giving 2K monitors a try soon on the other hand.

foresto 1y ago

> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. 15 years old? Have you seen many examples of this (I have not) or are you exaggerating to make a point? Regardless, some very popular gaming hardware from 10-12 years ago is still in use and still very capable in modern games, so long as they allow tuning the graphics down. People running an i5 3570K and RX 480 at 1080p don't generally expect to get the imagery or frame rates of a modern gaming rig, but they are reasonable to expect roughly 60 fps with (for example) low textures and shadow detail, no reflections, static lighting, etc. Perhaps this is what you meant by "minimum settings", but: While low-spec options like this have been the norm in 3D PC games practically forever, several very popular games released in the past 5 years have adopted anemic options menus that have negligible impact on performance at the low end. To someone with much experience tuning for older hardware, this is a striking and disappointing change. Especially now that gaming hardware upgrades are far more expensive than they were, and more people are struggling just to pay their living expenses. The change is almost certainly unnecessary. It smells like the developers just aren't putting any effort into it anymore. And it's not merely disappointing; it's also wasteful, both by pushing older hardware into the landfill and by denying opportunities to reduce power consumption.