Having gone to bed last night with Final Fantasy XVI installed yet unplayed on a Steam Deck , I awoke to find Valve have slapped the moody RPG with Unsupported status for the handheld. Its crime: an inability to "run well" on the Steam Deck’s internals, regardless of settings changes. Dammit, Clive.
I’ve given it a whirl myself this morning, and while a literal interpretation of "unsupported" arguably doesn’t apply to FFXVI – the Steam Deck can still launch and run it without detonating in one’s hands – it does ask a little too much of the hardware. The Low quality preset and FSR 3 on Ultra Performance is enough to keep me above 30fps in plenty of fights, but other areas will easily knock that down into the 20-25fps range, or even into the teens. Which ain’t particularly nice to play, even if you are still technically playing.
FSR 3 can provide frame gen as well as upscaling, but this manages to make things worse, introducing heavy stuttering in exchange for only a tiny handful of extra generated frames. (Strangely, nothing performs worse than the cutscenes, which I’ve repeatedly seen collapse to around the 17-20fps region for no clearly apparent reason. Though at least this pre-empts any potential annoyance about them also being capped at 30fps on PC.
) Also, and this isn’t part of Valve’s Steam Deck verification criteria but I can and will moan about it anyway: it’s a 152GB install. 152GB! So even if you decide the tough out the framerate dips, FFXVI is.