It's time for another performance roundup, including enhancements to No Man's Sky, Beat Slayer, The Thaumaturge, Go Fight Fantastic, Isonzo, and Fallout 76. Plus, a spotlight on an innovative tech product from Ugreen that's perfect for powering up your devices.
First off, let's talk about the Ugreen Nexo RG 65-watt charger. It features a revolutionary GANfast chip that achieves a remarkable 95% energy conversion rate, capable of charging a MacBook Air M2 up to 51% in 30 minutes. The charger is also a great addition to any shelf when not in use and it's funky design includes "snoozy eyes" when idle and a "smiley face" when fast charging and "happy eyes" when finished or trickle charging. It maintains a 45W output even when charging multiple devices, making it an ideal choice for your Steam Deck setup.
No Man's Sky Orbital Update
No Man's Sky has recently received another free content update dubbed the "Orbital Update," which still maintains the amazing performance as seen previously on the Steam Deck. Although there are occasional load spikes when entering or exiting planets and entering the Anomaly, it still maintains a solid 60 FPS at standard graphic settings, with motion blur off and everything else as standard.
Beat Slayer
Beat Slayer is a rhythmic action game that feels like the fantastic child of Hades and HiFi Rush. It plays smoothly at 60FPS on the LCD and up to 90FPS on the OLED with occasional drops with load spikes.
As it's a rhythm-based game, the calibration menu is crucial for timing accuracy, especially if you're using Bluetooth headphones, which can introduce a slight delay or if you connect to an external display, basically if you change from the norm on the deck directly, re-calibrate your timing.
The Thaumaturge
The Thaumaturge did update to allow Steam Deck users to adjust the settings ditching the locked down "Steam Deck" preset so we can finally change off of the forced FSR 3 settings.
Keeping the low preset but increasing shadow and texture quality to medium is our recommended settings and and capping the frame rate at 40 FPS on the deck itself. It's your choice between TSR High or AMD FSR 3 Quality (no Frame Gen), but we recommend TSR High; although it will still drop to 30 FPS in boss fights, it's much more stable.
Go Fight Fantastic
Go Fight Fantastic is really a co-op game, running perfectly out of the box on the Steam Deck. However the lack of online players will mean you are playing on your own but you have the ability to switch between characters on the fly to optimize gameplay.
Hopefully this picks up some players as the fights can get pretty tough and will be much more fun to play through with others as you can play off of each others skills which is much harder when swtiching yourself.
Isonzo
Isonzo came with a warning from the publishers that you should expect to die a lot and it didn't disappoint. Although it runs well on the Steam Deck, the small screen does make spotting enemies that little bit more tricky. Running on pretty much the lowest settings and FSR 2.2 on balanced it is playable at 40-60FPS and no issues joining multiplayer matches.
Fallout 76
Fallout 76 is currently a great buy with an 80% discount if you can snag it before April 19 2024. Our current best setting on the Steam Deck is to run the medium preset but to cap the Steam Deck at 40FPS. While this gives a pretty stable experience, there are still some loading spikes that push it under 30FPS briefly while travelling across the map. We do feel we should spend some more time on this one so look out for a dedicated Fallout 76 video in the near future
Get Your UGREEN Nexode RG 65W Charger here:
UGREEN Nexode RG 65W Charger (UK black): https://amzn.to/49tMImc
UGREEN Nexode RG 65W Charger (US black): https://bit.ly/3PZiz7e
UGREEN Nexode RG 65W Charger (Official store): https://bit.ly/4atXk5H