Digital Foundry's guide to getting the best out of Steam Deck docked

Valve’s Steam Deck is an excellent portable machine for 720p gaming, packing last-gen console performance in a compact shell – but can we push the system further? With a 4K display as a target output we’re going to drag the Deck as far as we can into docked, home theatre gaming. This may seem farcical but new second generation reconstruction techniques – FSR 2.0 and TSR – have just hit commercial games, providing massive performance gains for high-res rendering. Plus, there’s a wide library of older and less technically challenging content that the Steam Deck may be able to accelerate to high resolutions on raw performance alone. So can we actually achieve a good docked TV experience with the Steam Deck on a modern 4K display – or are the demands of high-res gaming just too much to ask from the low-power, low-bandwidth AMD APU at its heart?

While you could of course simply scale up 720p to fill a 4K screen, the results often aren’t flattering. Games at this resolution tend to look blurry and soft, with the scaling tech to preserve sharpness absent on many TVs. 1080p and above content fares better, so that’s what we’ll be targeting here – at a minimum, around double the pixels of the Steam Deck’s internal display. A true native 4K is going to elude us except in simple titles, but we should be able to push image quality quite a bit regardless.

First up, we’re going to be looking at some older and less demanding games – seventh generation console titles are often a good fit thanks to meagre performance demands and solid gamepad support. Half-Life 2 is a good example, running at 4K 60fps max settings without MSAA. Similarly, Deus Ex: Human Revolution hits 1440p60 just fine at medium settings, where image quality is reasonable, performance is solid, and the artwork holds up – and you can even go for 4K 30 if you prefer. Valkryia Chronicles and Dishonored both perform in a similar range at default settings at 1440p, though framerate dips may prompt you to opt for 1080p instead for a better 60fps lock. Both titles do hold up perfectly fine though and even compare favorably to their eighth-gen console ports – a big win for the Deck. Other games of a similar vintage fare worse though, such as Alan Wake, which requires 900p to hit 60fps, and Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is probably best played on Deck at 1080p30 – equal with PS4 and Xbox One, but not ideal for a 4K TV.

Steam Deck does offer tools to push image quality a bit further on a 4K set, most notably AMD’s FSR 1.0 scaling which produces a small but noticeable detail improvement over bilinear upscaling without introducing excessive aliasing. Modern console games that use AAA also perform well, where the Steam Deck is generally capable of 900p30 gameplay with the default graphical settings. This includes Horizon: Zero Dawn, Tales of Arise, and Grid Legends, though some games, like Dirt 5, are a bit heavier so 720p30 is a more suitable target. Image quality is predictably not great on the Steam Deck with these sorts of games, with most titles coming in with a resolve similar their Xbox One versions. FSR 1.0 can help somewhat and generally has a more pleasing interaction with TAA-style techniques than older post-process based AA, but it can only do so much here. One interesting point is Final Fantasy 7 Remake, released a few weeks ago, that runs on Steam Deck with fewer compilation stutters than Windows PC users face.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, we have games that use second-gen reconstructive techniques that use aggressive temporal upsampling to produce higher image detail, namely Unreal’s TSR and AMD’s FSR 2.0. God of War has an implementation of AMD’s new upsampling tech, but the results are a bit mixed. Image quality in static or slow-moving areas of the screen is good and looks similar to 1080p, despite rendering with less than half the pixels internally. The downside is that the image is covered in popping and fizzling disocclusion artifacts when Kratos no longer obscures a screen element or moves quickly, while artefacts also crop up in hair and particle effects. 1080p 30fps is just about doable with FSR 2.0 on balanced mode, but ultimately I preferred the cleaner presentation of a lower resolution.