The pursuit of performance on Valve’s Steam Deck is difficult at times, given the hardware restrictions in place. Now, a new AMD FSR 3 Steam Deck mod brings hope of opening the door to some higher frame rate figures, but it’s only a work in progress, meaning it’s got a long way to go before it reaches its potential.
Most of the best Steam Deck games run incredibly well on the Valve handheld, but not every title plays smoothly. This new FSR 3 mod shows the potential for more demanding games to get a boost on the Steam Deck, but the compromises are too severe in its current state.
LukeFZ is behind this new FSR 3 mod for the Steam Deck, and early signs suggest they are on to a winner. Taking games like Spider-Man Remastered, Hogwarts Legacy, and Cyberpunk 2077, the mod is able to creep out a higher fps figure than was possible before.
The downside? As a work-in-progress, the mod is very unstable. For instance, according to a video from Deck Wizard, to run the mod in The Last of Us, all graphical settings need to be on low, and any attempt to increase them will see the system crash. There can also be unusual graphical artifacts with any games that need to run at low quality to accommodate the mod.
Despite this, in The Last of Us, the FSR 3 mod pushes performance to a surprisingly stable 65-70 fps. For comparison, on the Steam Deck OLED, The Last of Us tops out at around 45 fps with FSR 2.2 enabled on ultra performance, while it drops to 30 fps on quality mode.
The signs are there that performance could be about to get much better in some key Steam Deck games, but more time is needed for the mod to be perfected and rolled out as a complete product. For now, the only way you can access the mod is by supporting LukeFZ on Patreon.
If you find yourself in need of more storage for your Deck, to save having to purge your backlog, one of the best MicroSD cards for Steam Deck should do the trick.