Oblivion Remastered Seems to Be Having Some Problems on Steam Deck

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered appears to be experiencing some performance issues on Steam Deck, and players may need to heavily tweak settings to achieve playable frame rates. After months of rumors and speculation, Bethesda fully unveiled and released The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered on April 22 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Nearly 20 years after the game’s original release, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered takes players back to Cyrodiil during the age of the Oblivion Crisis and the end of the Third Era. Developed in Unreal Engine 5, the remaster retains the game’s original voicework, scenario structure, and other memorable RPG elements while vastly improving the visuals and gameplay systems. However, the use of Unreal Engine 5 means that The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is fairly demanding on PCs, thanks to dynamic lighting systems, virtual shadow mapping, and other intensive features. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered may be Steam Deck verified, but the game has some problems running on the handheld system.

After booting The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered on Steam Deck, players will likely notice its graphics settings pre-configured to the low preset with Intel’s XeSS upscaling solution being set to Balanced, as spotted by PCGamesN. These settings are not enough to get the PC version of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered running at a stable 30 FPS on Steam Deck, since the platform is having problems running the game. Players must further tweak the settings and toggle Performance or Ultra Performance to increase the frame rate and avoid stutters and drops, but they may run into other issues in the process, such as reduced image clarity. Moreover, the use of frame generation to increase the frame rate can introduce input lag and ghosting if the starting frame rate is too low.

Gamers wanting the best possible performance on Steam Deck may need to stream The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered on Nvidia GeForce Now. Although an Nvidia GeForce Now subscription is needed to use the best possible performance settings, it will provide image quality that’s better than running the game natively on Steam Deck in its current state. It’s also worth noting that Xbox Game Pass subscribers have access to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, and it can be streamed via Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Currently, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered requires 125 GB of free storage space, and Steam recommends gamers have at least 16 GB of RAM on their PCs in order to play the game. The Steam Deck may have 16 GB of RAM internally, but players will need 32 GB of RAM and powerful modern GPUs and CPUs in order to run the game at recommended settings. If recent rumors are true, players may potentially enjoy a better handheld gaming experience playing The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered on Nintendo Switch 2.