The Dying Light The Beast Steam Deck rating is in, and we've managed to test the game on Valve's handheld to find out which settings work best. The good news is that Techland's determination to get its horror adventure running well on the handheld has paid off, and the performance is surprisingly solid throughout.
While the Dying Light The Beast system requirements went as far as to demand an RTX 5070 for the absolute best performance, the low-end demands only ask for a GTX 1060, giving hope that it might also run on the Steam Deck, even if the GTX 1060 is still more powerful than the custom AMD GPU inside the handheld. Following some additional optimizations by Techland, it appears as though it's managed to get the game running on the best gaming handheld, and Valve is clearly happy with the result, too. If you're dead set on playing on PC, we have a guide to best Dying Light The Beast settings to help you there as well.
Is Dying Light The Beast Steam Deck compatible?
Dying Light The Beast is Verified for the Steam Deck. This announcement is extremely welcome, confirming that Techland's latest horror adventure will run great on Valve's handheld using the default graphical settings.
Aware of the importance of the Steam Deck in modern gaming, Techland's rendering and audio director, Tomasz Szałkowski, said that "as a fan of the Steam Deck, I was personally driven to bring Dying Light The Beast to the platform."
This will be music to the ears of Deck owners, but it gets even better as Szałkowski continues, saying that "I oversaw every detail to make sure it runs really well, including a special 'performance' mode that contains a mix of tweaked settings and special optimizations together with HDR and CRR running smoothly on an OLED display."
We love it when developers go out of their way not just to get the green tick of approval from Valve, but when they also go into detail on what exactly they've done to ensure the game runs great on handhelds like the Steam Deck.
Best Dying Light The Beast Steam Deck settings
- Resolution: 1,200 x 800
- VSync: On
- Dynamic Resolution Scaling: Off
- FPS Limiter: Off
- Upscaler Type: TAAU
- Upscaling Mode: Balanced
- Sharpness: 40
- Frame Generation: Off
- Field of View: 45
- Glow: Off
- Light Streaks: On
- Lens Flare: On
- Chromatic Aberration: On
- Film Grain Effect: Off
- Motion Blur Intensity: 0
- Renderer Mode: D3D12
- Asynchronous Compute: On
- Texture Quality: High
- LOD Quality: Low
- Draw Distance Multiplier: 100
- Particle Quality: Medium
- Shadows Quality: Very Low
- Screen Space Shadows: On
- Ambient Occlusion Quality: Low
- Global Illumination Quality: Low
- Reflections Quality: Low
- Fog Quality: Low
- Postprocess Quality: Low
Using the above settings, we averaged 36fps once in the open world section of the game. There were occasional drops, but rarely did the frame rate drop below 30fps, which is quite the achievement considering how intense the on-screen action can get.
While the average sits at 36fps, there were also moments where the game rose to as high as 50fps. I initially believed that the settings would be locked by Techland in order to get good performance on the Deck, just like in Assassin's Creed Shadows, but almost every setting is changeable. The only difference is the addition of a new 'performance' preset, as mentioned when the Steam Deck verification was announced.
This optimization makes Dying Light The Beast one of the best Steam Deck games to play in 2025. Elsewhere, if your Deck is in need of some upgrades, check out our guide to the best Steam Deck accessories, where you can find docks, memory expansion options, and much more.
Will you be playing Dying Light The Beast on the Steam Deck or PC? Let us know over on our community Discord server.