The PC version of Ghost of Tsushima boasts excellent optimization, allowing players to enjoy the game even on less powerful hardware. Below, I will share the game settings for the Steam Deck that ensure high-quality visuals and nearly perfectly stable performance.
Regardless of preferred framerate, the following settings appear to be optimal for maintaining atmospheric, detail-rich visuals while virtually eliminating all issues related to resolution scaling. Image compression doesn’t fully convey how good it looks in motion.
Screen Settings
- Window Mode: Fullscreen
- Display Resolution: 1280×800
- VSYNC: Off (For Steam Deck LCD, turn on 1/2 for 30 FPS preset)
- Contrast: Your preference
Graphics Settings
- Motion Blur: 0 (Recommended to reduce motion artifacts)
- Field of View: Should not affect performance, played at 6
- Texture Quality: High
- Texture Filtering: Anisotropic 8x
- Shadow Quality: Low (Higher settings heavily impact performance)
- Level of Detail: Medium
- Terrain Detail: Medium
- Volumetric Fog: Low
- Depth of Field: Off (Removes numerous background issues during cutscenes)
- Screen Space Reflections: Low
- Ambient Occlusion: SSAO Performance (Highly recommended for atmosphere)
- Bloom: Off (Without it, fire and particle effects are less distorted)
- Vignette: Optional
- Water Caustics: On
Best Image Quality at 30 FPS
Return to the screen settings and adjust the following:
- Upscale Method: Off
- Dynamic Resolution Scaling: 30
- Anti-Aliasing: XeSS Native AA or AMD FSR3 Native AA
The first option ensures a much more stable image when rotating the camera, but choosing AMD’s solution will make everything sharper and more jagged – choose according to your preference. For the regular Steam Deck, turn on VSYNC at half the refresh rate, and for the Steam Deck OLED, use the built-in SteamOS limiter to 30 FPS.
Frame Generation in Ghost of Tsushima on Steam Deck
The AMD FSR 3 frame generator is not available by default on the Steam Deck, but if you want to test it, simply add the launch command SteamDeck=0 %command% in the game’s launch options.
SDHQ reports that this can achieve 60 FPS, but according to my tests, a stable framerate is beyond the device’s capabilities, and the numerous artifacts and severely degraded, unreadable graphics aren’t worth it.
I tried setting a 50 FPS cap, which slightly improved performance and stability, but I still don’t think it’s worth the hassle. This technology is probably better suited for ASUS ROG ALLY or Lenovo Legion, where there’s more processing headroom – combined with my optimized settings, the results should be at least solid.
