Since Horizon Zero Dawn is now available on Steam, you may be curious about its performance and best settings on the Steam Deck.
Although Horizon Zero Dawn is Steam Deck Verified, you need to fiddle with the graphics and SteamOS settings to run the game as optimally as possible and conserve your Steam Deck's battery life.
With that being said, let's take a look at how well Horizon: Zero Dawn runs on the Steam Deck and what adjustments you can make to your settings for a smooth gaming experience.
Horizon Zero Dawn Steam Deck performance
Most users have reported being able to play the game at 30 to 40 FPS on decent graphics settings without issue. It's also possible to bump up your frame rate to 60 FPS at the cost of your graphics quality and a bit of battery life.
Stutter issues may occasionally occur in this game, particularly during location transitions within the map. This can be attributed to the process of generating shaders for new areas, and the issue tends to diminish over time as you cover the same biomes over and over.
A Reddit user suggested that CryoUtilities + 4GB VRAM hacks will definitely help with the performance issues.
Best settings for Horizon Zero Dawn on Steam Deck
Since Horizon: Zero Dawn is a story-driven, single-player experience with beautifully rendered areas, it's best to prioritize the graphics quality in your settings.
Try to use these settings to get a taste of the eye candy Horizon: Zero Dawn has to offer without impacting its performance on the Steam Deck too much:
- Resolution: Native
- Frame rate: Limit to 30 FPS
- Textures: High
- Model Quality: Medium
- Antistropic Filltering: High
- Shadows: Medium
- Reflections: Medium
- Clouds: Medium
- Ambient Occlusion: High
- Anti-aliasing: FXAA
- Refresh rate: 60Hz
- GPU: 1600Mhz
Of course, you're free to adjust any of these to better suit your preferences. Also, keep in mind that you'll get about 2 hours of game time with these settings before your battery dies on you.
Looking for an easier way to navigate your Steam Deck? Check out these Steam Deck shortcuts.