Is ‘Avowed’ Playable On Steam Deck? Best Settings And Graphics Tweaks Emergency USA

If you’re a Steam Deck owner hoping to explore the Living Lands of Obsidian’s Avowed on your favorite handheld, I’m happy to deliver some positive news. Even during the RPG’s pre-launch window, Avowed is running smoothly on Valve’s portable. And after discovering that Monster Hunter Wilds is basically unplayable on Steam Deck, it’s refreshing to have this victory.

Before you jump in, though, there are some crucial settings you’ll need to tweak in order to enjoy the game at a steady 30+FPS, and save your eyeballs from squinting at the abnormally small text size.

‘Avowed’ On Steam Deck: Recommended Settings

The first thing to know going in: AMD FSR is mandatory.

I played the first few areas of the game in first person POV, including some exploration and combat, with Avowed’s Low graphics preset and FSR disabled, but the Steam Deck struggled to stay above 30FPS. The game frequently ran between 25FPS and 30FPS, which didn’t feel playable to me.

I ran through the same areas again in first person with AMD FSR enabled and set to “Balanced,” which found the game consistently rendering above 35FPS, without too severe a sacrifice in image quality.

Playing in third-person doesn’t seem as performant.

Although, as you’ll see from the comparison images above, distant textures are going to look somewhat soft and muddled either way. (The final published images here may also be compressed.) On the bright side, frame pacing was smooth, and there was no stuttering when panning the camera around or during combat.

AMD FSR obviously comes with some visual compromises, and a minor level of graininess gets added to the image. Ordinarily this is barely noticeable, but when you’re feeding upscaling tech low quality, low resolution images to begin with, the overall appearance can suffer. In the waterfall screenshot below, we see that the mist definitely exhibits some artifacting and looks very pixelated.

In motion, however, the environments aren’t going to look bad enough to be distracting.

I do want to emphasize that despite nitpicks like this, Avowed feels good to play on Steam Deck! To enjoy the best possible experience, here are the settings I recommend changing:

• Graphics Preset: Low (do this first)
• Motion Blur: 0%
• VSync: Off (I didn’t notice any screen tearing on my Steam Deck OLED, and prefer to stay above 30FPS when possible)
• Ray Tracing: Disabled (This is ON by default!)
• Upscaling: AMD FidelityFX 3
• FSR Quality: Balanced or Performance
• FSR Sharpness: This is personal preference, but I’d start at 35% and increase it from there.
• The Advanced Settings that are below “Graphics Quality” should all remain at Low, but you can experiment with changing Texture Quality and Post Processing Quality to improve the appearance of textures, at a very slight hit to frame rate.
• In the “UI” tab, set text size to Largest

Additionally, it may be helpful to go into the game’s Properties before you launch it, and ensure the “Compatibility” setting is checked and “Proton Hotfix” is selected. This will just ensure that if Valve makes any improvements that will benefit Steam Deck players (as it frequently does, most famously with Elden Ring), you’ll be first in line to get them.

Here is some footage of gameplay (timestamped to start at 3:46) using the same settings I recommended. While the quality of the capture itself isn’t the best, the smoothness of the gameplay is evident. However, running around in cities may occasionally reduce your framerate.

Avowed officially launches on February 18, and even though I only intended to do some performance testing, I’m finding myself getting sucked in. Even though it’s not a truly open-world RPG, it’s already starting to scratch my Elder Scrolls itch.

The best advice is to hold off on buying Avowed until after launch, and wait to see what optimizations Valve and developer Obsidian might deliver.