I am running everything at lowest settings, except shadows which are the second lowest setting, and I am using TAA (or was it SMAA I don’t remember) and I am using a replacement DLL file that replaces the DLSS with AMD FSR 2.2.1, FSR is set to scale 1.5 (means the internal resolution is rendered at 75% of native resolution, but I added AntiAliasing before FSR)
I also lock the game to 30fps,
This should not run at max power draw from the system on a chip, I’d rather prefer 15-30% more battery life than fancier graphics.
I wish I could get medium textures, but at least while using FSR (tried with FSR1 also) there is not enough VRAM on the steamdeck to fit medium textures. I think when I tested medium textures, a few textures suddenly popped up to medium quality, but most just stayed at low.
I’ve only played through Act1, just treated it as a tutorial with an origin character, and now I am playing through Act1 again with a custom character. (I borrowed a friends GOG version, but now I bought the game on steam, and I copied over my GOG saves to my desktop but I chose not to put them back on the steam deck in the steam versions wine prefix)
I hope they improve the CPU usage issues in Act 3 before I get there. I suspect it’s mostly unfixable, maybe I will need to play the game at 20 or 25 fps in Act 3, I don’t know. I am in no hurry to beat the game, I am a family guy and I just get to play a bit here and a bit there, so the steam deck’s sleep function is a god GabeN send. I would not be able to play a game like this at this point in my life if it were not for that, and it was the main reason I bought a steam deck.
I used to use i3 as my main desktop, now I run sway. But I haven’t installed i3 or sway on the steam deck. Mainly because I have spent years perfecting my i3wm config, used days converting it over to sway, then used months tweaking it. And I just don’t want to do that again on my steam deck.
But here is what I would try if I didn’t have two kids and lots of responsibilities.
I’d try installing sway, or i3wm if I couldn’t get that going in an arch Linux distrobox. Arch Linux just because I am familiar with it, and it’s very maluable. Pick which you are most familiar with if you want. And then I would launch that as a non steam app.
Then what I am dredding the most comes next. Configuring the window manager. I’d take my current sway config, or my current i3wm config and just rip out what is not needed. And plan and craft keybinds together with a steam input configuration… I think it would be possible to make a very comfortable and usable configuration.
the main thing I think valve should do to make desktop more usable is to detect when a keyboard input is in focus and show the on screen keyboard automatically. And also show move it to the top if it means you would see the text input field. Or maybe use some gamescope magic to move the viewport you are looking at the desktop so that you always can see the text input. Or some apps like terminal emulators would have to be resized.
It won’t be perfect, at least without improvements to gamescope. But it can be quite interesting