this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Steam Deck

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The TL;DR: The game won't launch on current steamOS, but preview build 3.7.6 fixes the launch issue.

Unfortunately the game is unable to maintain decent frame rates even with severe reductions in graphical settings.

The drastic decrease in performance compared to Doom 2016/Doom Eternal is due to the game using mandatory ray tracing for lighting.

It's possible that we'll see some patches or mods that improve performance, but at launch it will not be a good deck experience.

EDIT: Not sure why Lemmy is embedding that youtube video, there's an actual article about the performance, and there's a different video on how the Steam Deck itself actually performs with the game.

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[–] kadup@lemmy.world 29 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I do 99.9% of my gaming on the Steam Deck... But it's also important to recognize when it's time to let go.

It was released using AMD hardware in the middle of a transition to ray tracing and path tracing replacing rasterized effects. It's great hardware, but we need to accept that new releases will probably not be compatible with this system.

[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 23 points 6 days ago

To be clear, the steam deck supports some ray tracing and it's enough to run the game, but the performance impact is too much to run at 30fps.

The more powerful ROG Ally also isn't able to hold a consistent 30fps either (despite using a way higher tdp on it's chip), so this isn't a Deck exclusive issue.

[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 6 days ago

They already have a patch to fix it in beta. And I refuse to accept that. AAA companies need to learn to optimize their games if they want people to buy them. It's gotten so bad that a lot of new games run like shit on the PS5.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The only stuff that can run ray tracing well (60fps or better, well) are currently GPUs that cost ... $600 if you're lucky, more like starting at $825 or $850, going up to $2000+.

This is independent of AMD or Nvidia, at this point. Yes, you can get better RT out of an Nvidia card, but you'll be paying significantly more.

What you mean to say is: Games with forced RT instead of actual graphics options force you into the Nvidia monopoly.

...

Handhelds can't handle RT.

Like just none, barring adding on an eGPU.

Switch 2 could be an exception, but I doubt it'll be able to do more than 30fps with RT on, with say, Cyberpunk 2077.

The only reason consoles can handle RT at all is because they use checkerboard rendering, which is basically sort of a mix between using interpolated frames and also upscaling.

480p fully renders each frame, 480i only updates half the pixels on the screen each frame, usually with alternating scanlines.

Checkerboard rendering is more or less another way of doing that, but in a checkerboard pattern, that also upscales by a factor of two... so when a console says its outputting at 4k, thats true, but it isn't rendering at 4k.

...

The steam deck overlay does have a half rate shader rendering option, I have found this helpful in certain games/emulators... though sometimes it makes too much of the game look like too much ass, when it is either heavily reliant on shaders and/or they are wildly unoptimized.

It is theoretically possible that this option could help at least somewhat... the author mentions trying deckyframegen on a game that just came out, apparently having no idea that decky framegen needs time to... you know, incorperate some other mod that figures out how to hack FSR into the game, or do it themselves.

Either that, or go into the game's config files and see if there is some value or toggle that can be flipped to just actually turn RT off... which I guess at this point just is what people would and have called a 'graphics mod' for many other games where something like this is done.

...

Nvidia and Unreal heavily pushing RT is a market strategy to ensure the monopoly power of Nvidia, and the further usage of UE5.

...

EDIT: Looks like idTech 8 doesn't normally/fully support Vulkan on Linux.

If they wanted to make a release that works without RT, they could, they'd just have to rip out all the RT stuff and make a version compatible with Vulkan-base, and that looks like it would run well on AMD GPUs / a Deck, but that apparently was not a launch priority for them.

Which is kind of weird, because idTech7 was... only Vulkan, on PC... and did support RayTracing, and Doom Eternal, with RayTracing, did run decently well on high end AMD GPUs of the time (6800, 6900, etc), despite having less and less advanced RT cores than the Nvidia 3000 series.

[–] Shiggles@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

New AAA releases that can’t be bothered to optimize worth a damn. If those are something you just can’t do without, then sure, but it’s odd to be all doom and gloom over less than 5% of the games people will play this year lmao(15% of steam playtime in 2024 was new releases, it was a pretty even split between AAA, AA, and indie, and not every AAA game is optimized like ass).

[–] Rolive@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I'd be pleasantly surprised if it even runs at all. Mandatory ray tracing is stupid though.

[–] overload@sopuli.xyz 6 points 5 days ago

It's bullshit. iD's engine is well optimised but this is a requirement that screws people who don't otherwise need to upgrade their GPU.

[–] BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago

It ships with Denuvo malware, so I just assumed.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Didn't they manage to get Indiana Jones working after a while? That's on the same engine, right? I'll be patient. Don't have the energy for Doom at the moment anyways.

[–] GalacticHero@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago

I honestly had no issue with Indiana Jones at launch on the Deck. My tolerance for performance issues is probably higher than average, granted, but I started playing it within a few days of launch on the Deck and beat the main story within a few weeks of that. It was officially unsupported and there were absolutely some framerate hiccups, but it was totally playable and enjoyable. It actually ran better on the Deck than my desktop (also Linux, to be fair) for a while because of nvidia driver issues. The faster pace of Doom will make it more of a problem, though.

[–] BmeBenji@lemm.ee 6 points 5 days ago

That’s so disappointing to hear. DOOM and DOOM Eternal not only run fucking fantastically on the Steam Deck, but they look fucking gorgeous on it too.

I had my suspicions that Microsoft would fuck something up and now my suspicions say that this is it (and I hope this is the extent of it)

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 7 points 5 days ago

This is disappointing. DOOM 2016 runs like a dream on SD and it's my go-to when showing it off and handing it to someone. Devs need to spend less time on ridiculous visuals and more on gameplay and performance. Fortunately I had no intention of buying the game anyway because Denuvo.

[–] frank@sopuli.xyz 7 points 6 days ago

Ah man that's pretty disappointing. I probably won't buy it until then