Titan Quest 2 just launched into early access, and if you are wondering if this epic ARPG journey can be enjoyed on the Steam Deck, the short answer is yes, but with a few little compromises.
An early performance evaluation by SteamDeckHQ confirms that the game does run on Steam Deck, but not without issues. Even at the lowest settings, frequent framerate drops and performance problems are present, making it less than ideal for a really smooth portable play.
Graphics Settings: What Works and What Doesn’t
The game does support upscaling options like TSR, XeSS 2, and FSR 3, but not all are working the same on the Steam Deck:
- TSR is currently the best option, offering pretty decent image quality and performance. Setting it to 65% render scale was the sweet spot according to SteamDeckHQ.
- FSR 3 causes major stuttering and glitchy grass textures. You can skip this option.
- FSR 3 Frame Generation comes with heavy input lag, making the game hard to control. Not recommended either.
- Zooming in the camera can improve FPS by 4 to 10 frames depending on the zone, so a slight zoom is recommended.
- The game is heavy on RAM, sometimes pushing close to the Steam Deck’s memory limits.
- A rare crash was reported when putting the Deck to sleep mid-game, so make sure to save often if you plan to pause your session.
- There is no official Steam Deck preset or optimization yet.
Basically, the final verdict is yes, you can run Titan Quest 2 on a Steam Deck, but expect some occasional lag and FPS drops. The best results are only on lowest settings with TSR at 65%.
Of course, keep in mind that this test is only with the current early access release version, and the game will most likely get a ton of updates, making things perfectly fine in the future!
If the Steam Deck is your only option, it is definitely already playable enough for slower-paced grinding sessions. But for a smoother experience, especially if you plan on playing for hours, a more powerful PC will be better. But expect the devs to smoothen things out for Steam Deck in the future anyway!