Lords of the Fallen Steam Deck performance: Best settings for handheld

Looking to play Lords of the Fallen on Steam Deck? We’ve played the game for hours on Valve’s handheld, and have assembled a list of the best settings.

Lords of the Fallen might utilize fancy features like being built on Unreal Engine 5, but the new demanding gothic fantasy hack-and-slash game is also playable on Steam Deck. It’s not without its odd hitches when first starting the game, where you may have to skip past an intro video that chooses not to load.

Aside from that, the preset configuration for Lords of the Fallen on Steam Deck is certainly not terrible, but it could also be a little more consistent. To that end, we’ve perused all of the game’s settings to stabilize your framerate as much as possible.

Lords of the Fallen: Best settings for Steam Deck

• Resolution: 1280 x 800
• Vsync: On
• FPS Limit: 60 FPS
• Graphics Preset: Low
• Motion Blur: Off
• Film Grain: Off
• Chromatic Aberration: Off

Steam Deck settings

• Refresh Rate: 40
• Half Rate shading: Off

For whatever reason, as of the build that we have tested, you cannot change the rendering resolution of Lords of the Fallen on Steam Deck. No matter how much we tried, including exiting to the game’s main splash screen, were we able to lower the resolution further to optimize performance. We suspect that this might be a bug, and will be patched in the future.

With that in mind, we set all of our graphics settings to the game’s “Low” preset, and turned off Motion Blur, Film Grain, and Chromatic aberration, which we personally prefer.

From here, within the game’s opening area, we managed to achieve anywhere from 30-40 FPS, which offers a more than playable experience when gaming on the go. However, in the game’s more demanding areas, expect performance to occasionally dip below 30FPS.

One thing to note however, is that half-rate shading is currently not supported. After turning it on, we had some errant issues with the geometry within Lords of the Fallen. Ground and wall textures occasionally turned transparent, which is less than ideal.

Should you play Lords of the Fallen on handheld?

CI GAMES

While Lords of the Fallen has its fair share of issues running on Steam Deck, relating to render resolution and black screens on certain cinematics, the game is absolutely playable on Valve’s handheld console. If you were to play it on a stronger handheld like the ROG Ally or Ayaneo 2S, then you might even be able to reach a steady 60FPS.

One thing to note is that some HUD elements, such as your weaponry equipped and items, might have text or button prompts that also appear to be illegible. It’s certainly not got perfect performance, but once you’re in the action, the game is indeed fully functional.

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