Horizon: Forbidden West Complete Edition received a negative rating from Valve regarding its performance on the Steam Deck,. Even on the lowest settings, the game often dropped frames significantly and usually operated below 30 FPS, which was not very comfortable. However, the latest GE-Proton significantly improves gameplay, even in more populated areas!
Latest Update and ProtonGE
The difference in performance is surprisingly significant, reaching up to 20-25%, and importantly, there is no need to completely sacrifice graphic quality. Stuttering has been greatly reduced, and I feel that gameplay is more stable, especially during machine travels, compared to Horizon Zero Dawn. The same applies to dynamic battles – it’s really impressive! While exploring the vast world, occasional and momentary performance drops may still occur but quickly return to normal. Visually, the game has nothing to be ashamed of, but of course, don’t expect graphical extravagance on the level of powerful PCs and PlayStation 5 consoles.
Optimized Settings for Horizon Forbidden West on Steam Deck
Display Tab:
– Display Resolution: 1280×800
– VSync: Off
– Dynamic Resolution Scaling: Disabled
– Upscale Method: AMD FSR 2.2
– Upscale Quality: Balanced
Graphics Tab:
– Texture Quality: Medium (no noticeable side effects)
– Texture Filtering: Anisotropic x8
– Shadow Quality: Very Low
– Screen Space Shadows: Off
– Ambient Occlusion: SSAO (slight performance degradation, but significant graphics improvement)
– Screen Space Reflections: Off
– Level of Detail: Very Low
– Hair Quality: Very Low
– Crowd Quality: Low
– Shadow Quality: Low
– Terrain Quality: low
– Water Quality: Low
– Clouds Quality: Low
– Translucency Quality: Default
– Parallax Occlusion Mapping: Off
– Field of View: 0%
– Depth of Field: Off
– Bloom: On
– Motion Blur Strength: 0 (absolutely necessary, literally destroys the image)
– Sharpness: 0 (personally, even at 0, sharpening is noticeable)
– Lens Flares, Vignette, Radial Blur – as preferred, I have them enabled
– Chromatic Aberration: Off (essential, deteriorates image quality)
SteamOS Settings:
– Framerate Limit: 30 FPS (60 or 90Hz depending on the model)
With these settings, gameplay fluidity for me is a solid 30 FPS with minor drops. During battles, where precision is crucial, I haven’t encountered significant issues. I am genuinely pleasantly surprised by the performance improvement after forcing GE Proton.
