Final Fantasy XVI is rough on Steam Deck, but it has potential

A surprise demo just dropped for Final Fantasy XVI on PC, and I couldn’t help but download it on my Steam Deck to see what shape the game is in. I’ll be honest: it’s not great, but with a little bit of dedicated optimization, it will earn Steam Deck Verification.

Despite being the best handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck is now struggling against many of its rivals in terms of power. The Asus ROG Ally X vastly outperforms Valve’s portable, but it also comes at a considerably higher MSRP. In games like Final Fantasy XVI, the power gap becomes painfully clear, but it’s not all doom and gloom for the Deck.

Across my hour spent with the Final Fantasy XVI demo on the Steam Deck OLED, I found that performance was at its best with AMD FSR 3 enabled, but frame generation needed to be disabled. All other settings are at their lowest, as expected, and this returned an average of 31fps.

The issue is that the game doesn’t look too pretty in motion. There is visible blurring around the edges of character models and scenery, and this is down to the dynamic resolution scaling option being on by default. Disabling this and selecting the Quality setting improved the image quality, but dropped the average fps to 26.

Final Fantasy XVI also doesn’t auto-detect the Steam Deck’s display resolution and forces the windowed display mode and 720p by default. This can be changed to borderless and thus enables an 800p resolution, which is best for the Deck.

Outside of these changes, it’s hard to suggest any further amendments based on my time with the game. While that may sound like I’m giving up, that’s far from the truth. Getting the performance I did out of the Steam Deck is an absolute positive given that we’re still weeks out from launch.

In the time between now and the Final Fantasy XVI PC release date, further optimizations can be made, as well as in the post-release window, to improve performance on Valve’s handheld. It’s not an easy task by any means, but it’s very possible that FFXVI may end up with the coveted green tick of approval from Valve.

In the meantime, check out the Final Fantasy XVI system requirements to get an idea of how the game will perform on your gaming PC.