No Rest for the Wicked is here, and a huge thanks to Private Division for giving us a key to test this one out. But the claims on Twitter that this would be playable on deck from day one are definitely up for debate.
I suppose that's true. Like, it runs, but when we see cutscenes going down to 10 to 25 frames per second, it really is debatable whether it really is playable. Oh, and at least it does have the HDR toggle. So if you are on the OLED and you're recording, you can at least turn HDR off. Performance on this is really all over the place, though. We have some horrendous load spikes in quite a few areas.
For the most part, we can get it around 30 frames per second, but we are losing 30 to 40% resolution scale to get there in the first place. The auto frame resolution or resolution scaling doesn't work the best, so you are better off just fixing this where some areas you think that you might get away with only a 70% resolution scale dip. It really throws it back in your face as soon as you start moving around or reaching any enemies. And the issue is, even with the performance mode and on 70% resolution scale, we really see some horrible shimmering effects. And if you go near a waterfall, it just looks absolutely awful.
You can get around most of this though, at 70% without too much of a dip. But when you go up into some of the higher areas, 20 frames per second becomes normal again, and it really doesn't feel very good at all, especially as this is a souls-like and getting your dodge and parries right is really important. So you really can't be doing with any dips when you don't want them.
So my recommended settings for now is the performance default with 60% resolution scale. And turn off that frame rate target. You might be able to turn it on just to get you there a little bit better when you do get those dips. In other areas it does seem to feel okay, but it really does stutter all over the place, especially when we're moving areas and depending on what environment is around you, it really does depend on how bad that frame rate gets. There's load spikes are the same across all systems.
It seems as even if we do play this on GeForce NOW or a higher end system, there's load spikes often and really do dip majorly often leading to a swift death.
No Rest for the Wicked has been added to GeForce NOW and we can run it on the Steam Deck at a solid 60 frames per second, with the full ultra graphics.
You have to admit, this game does actually look really good, but it just needs that optimization. Even with an RTX 4080-powered GPU, it's still not 100% stable. And we do still get this load spike dips when we're transitioning areas.