Das Callisto-Protokoll – Beste Steam-Deck-Einstellungen

The Preface

There’s no denying that at this current time, the game needs some optimizations. Jedoch, some of you, wie ich, love the Steam Deck! That means there would be nothing more joyous than some handheld horror, und lass es mich dir sagen: it works just fine!

Some things are worth noting: don’t target more than 30fps. The Steam Deck is powerful, but not THAT powerful, and graphically intense games like this just aren’t going to run a full 60fps.

Sekundär, I spent HOURS trying to find the best balance between visual quality and framerate stability. Es ist nicht perfekt, Wohlgemerkt: you WILL still have areas of heavy framerate dips, but the game looks good enough to use as the perfect excuse to show off the Steam Deck to your friends and one of THE best looking games you can run on it, Zeitraum!

Ohne weitere Umschweife, let’s get into the settings complete with notes should you decide to change your priorities!

The Settings

Wie erwähnt, don’t bother trying to go for 60fps. It won’t be stable even if you set everything to its lowest and make the game look like garbage. You’ll get 60fps looking at a wall or the floor, but once anything is happening, it’ll drop. Stattdessen, turn on v-sync in the game and set the framerate to 30. Von dort, here are the settings to get the most out of your experience!

DISPLAY

In erster Linie, the game will set itself to either 1280×720 if you’re docked, or 1280×800 if you’re handheld. You’ll want to change it to 1280×720 even if you’re handheld as the game does NOT support 1280×800 and you’ll have wasted black bars.

The resolution render percentage is THE biggest framerate factor. Tatsächlich, even though I’ve set it to 90, I’ve found that in handheld mode, you can go down to 80 with virtually no discernible difference AND get a more stable framerate (I had to flip between two screenshots to tell the res difference). I DO want to note that due to the resolution, some text will be hard to read. The usual Steam Deck warning some of us know very well lol

Und schließlich, I found that the default gamma was just ridiculously over-contrasted, and that TV 2.2 provided the best overall image quality between light and dark. It’s almost like a post-process color grading and HDR effect combined.

LIGHTING

This area contains the most GPU heavy things, and I found I could really only turn up shadow quality without noticing MAJOR dips in framerates all too often.

Physical refractions and ray-tracing are pretty much out of the question. Obwohl, if you’ve dropped to 80% resolution scale in the last section, you could possibly afford physical refractions with a pretty small hit of about 2-3fps. Dann wieder, when you’re capped at 30fps, just a few fps can make all the difference, so my recommendation remains firm.

EFFECTS

There’s not a lot to fiddle with, Hier. You’ll want to disable motion blur, obwohl: we’ll be using both temporal AA and temporal rendering which both cause lots of motion blur on their own. If you add motion blur, it just looks terrible. Zusätzlich, you WILL want to use temporal AA: it’s what provides the best image quality overall despite running slightly below 720p. It’s what also allows you to drop the render percentage even to 80% with virtually no discernible difference. Subsurface scattering is also something you’ll want: it’s what makes their skin look soft and touchable. Alter, vertrau mir!

zuletzt, I normally HATE film grain, aber hier, it helps fill in the image with a sort of „Textur“. This helps masks some things from the last settings section.

ADVANCED

Here are THE core settings to the game’s graphics. Set the upscaling to Temporal: don’t bother with the FSR settings as they ALL look TERRIBLE or perform WORSE than the in-engine upscale method. You can fiddle with this, but you’ll find out very quickly that none of the FSR settings come close to the performance and visual quality of the temporal upscale (it’s the same method used in Killzone Shadowfall!).

Mesh quality is your overall graphical quality of the game, and Medium is actually the lowest setting (Ja, I know lol). Textures and filtering are both fine at Medium as well, and allow for textures like carbon fiber on the armor to be rather distinct. Combined with the film grain from above, you’ll even be able to take some very worthy screenshots!

And that’s that, you’re ready to get cooking!

The Proof

Think I’m messing with you and that I’m crazy? Well get this: I streamed this on launch day BEFORE they even did the first optimization patch. I streamed it for 2 hours and thus you have all the proof you need that it runs just fine this way. YouTube video linked below!

Denken Sie daran: my render percentage was 90 because I was docked playing on a TV. You’ll eek out another 2-5fps on average by dropping that to 80 if you’re playing handheld.

Enjoy manmade horrors beyond your comprehension in the palm of your hands!