Resident Evil Requiem has, in terms of technical fidelity versus PC power demands, one of the best bang:buck ratios to come out of a triple-A’er in donkey’s ages. It’s not terribly surprising, then, that Requiem can run well enough on the Steam Deck too.
Now, the Deck is not a miracle worker – if it was, the LCD version would probably be un-discontinuing itself – and the bounty of frames that you can easily claim on desktop hardware is far more elusive on Valve’s cheap handheld. But with the right settings, Capcom’s enjoyable action-horror yarn can be made plenty playable, broadly to the same degree that the Resident Evil 4 remake achieved three years ago. That’s still an impressive feat of low-end engineering, given Requiem’s markedly higher system requirements.
First, though, some glumness. Resi Requiem’s PC version is typically a very considered one, though this seemingly doesn’t extend to native support for 16:10 display resolutions. As such, playing it on the Steam Deck means playing at 1280×720 and leaving narrow black bars to fill out the rest of its 800p screen. It’s also slightly harsher on battery life than Resi 4, which on an original LCD model, drank a full charge in a little under 1h 30m. Requiem only took 1h 18m.
It still handles as well as Resi 4, though, the series’ console origins clearly evident in a slick (and very Steam Deck-friendly) gamepad control scheme that doesn’t really need any further modifying via SteamOS. Default text and UI sizes are also big enough to save on squinting, and even when I was playing pre-release, Requiem didn’t exhibit any compatibility issues that may have otherwise required intervention by Proton Experimental or Proton GE to fix. It works, and works seamlessly.
Resident Evil Requiem Steam Deck performance and settings guide
As long as we’re comparing Requiem and Resi 4, the newer game’s heightened RAM requirements – 16GB at minimum, up from 8GB – do come into play, as the Steam Deck only meets them on a technicality. Basically, it does have 16GB of physical memory, but that’s split between the CPU and GPU, rather than being sixteen gigs of dedicated system RAM. I’m fairly sure this is why, while playing on the Deck, I saw little stutters and framerate drops, whereas even basic configurations of our testing desktop invariably ran smoothly.
Still, it’s fine, really. On the Low graphics preset with FSR 3.1 upscaling on Quality mode, the Steam Deck can stay above 30fps in Requiem’s toughest areas while most commonly landing in the 40-45fps range, even climbing up to 60fps in the ornate but narrow corridors that form much of the game’s first half. Higher minimum specs or not, that’s more or less how Resi 4 performed on similar settings. Later on, after Leon drives his lovingly product-placed Porsche into the more open, effects-ridden Raccoon City, there are more of the aforementioned dips into the thirties, but it’s never so stop-start as to irritate.
Because many of Requiem’s individual graphics settings have a negligible impact on performance, it’s also possible – and, as evidenced by this article, recommended by me – to turn up a few more visual niceties than you’d be afforded with a downtuned preset. After testing on those city streets, I’ve arrived at the settings list below, which produced pretty much the same level of performance as a full page of Low settings did.
- Motion blur: Off
- Ray tracing: Off
- Hair strands: Off
- Texture quality: High
- Texture filter quality: High (ANISO x16)
- Mesh quality: Low
- Screen space reflections: Off
- Subsurface scattering: High
- Lens distortion: On (+ Chromatic aberration)
- Depth of field: On
- Upscaling technology/Upscaling mode: DLSS/FSR 4/FSR 3.1 on Quality mode
- Frame generation: Off
- Particle lighting: On
- Volumetric fog generation: Normal
- Lens dirt: On
- Lens flare: Standard
- Shadow quality: Normal
- Contact shadows: On
- Ambient occlusion: High
- VFX quality: High
This isn’t actually a million miles off my suggested settings for desktops, with just a couple of minor tweaks and one blatantly obvious one. Ray tracing, it should go without saying, is a no-no, despite its relatively mild performance impact on full-fat graphics cards. I also think it’s worth cutting hair strands and screen space reflections; with some regret, as it’s instantly noticeable that Grace and Leon’s barnets have been robbed of their finer detail, but then these do impose two of the fattest Steam Deck framerate taxes out of the entire visuals menu.
Ultimately, mind, Resi Requiem earns good marks for handheldability. Even if it’s not as velvety on a Deck as it is on decent big-rig hardware, few games are, and even fewer are those blockbusters whose pursuit of ray-traced, subsurface-scattered graphics smut isn’t entirely at the cost of the ability to run on cheap or portable PCs. More like this, please.
