By There is something undeniably magical about taking a massive, ambitious PC game and shrinking it down to fit in the palms of your hands. I spend a lot of my time tinkering with the Steam Deck, pushing it to the absolute limit to see what it can handle. Recently, I managed to get my hands on the highly anticipated beta for Osiris Reborn, a sci-fi experience that has been on my radar for quite some time. But as we all know in the PC gaming space, ‘beta’ can mean a lot of things, especially when you are trying to run an early build on a portable machine.
Today, I want to share my honest, unfiltered experience running this beta on the Steam Deck. We will dive into the graphical settings I used, the performance hurdles I encountered, a specific utility workaround that absolutely saved my playthrough, and whether or not you should jump through the hoops required to get access right now.
The Harsh Reality of Native Performance
Let us get right to the elephant in the room: out of the box, the native performance of this beta on the Steam Deck is, frankly, unplayable. I know that is not what anyone wants to hear, but it is the reality of testing early builds. When I first booted up the game, I was greeted with the kind of performance that immediately makes you reach for the graphics menu.
I spent a good chunk of time tweaking sliders and toggles, trying to find that sweet spot between visual fidelity and a stable framerate. Ultimately, I had to turn every single graphical setting down to ‘Low.’ But even that was not enough. I had to rely on AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, specifically FSR 1, and set it to ‘Performance’ mode. For those who might be a bit newer to the technical side of things, FSR renders the game at a lower resolution and then upscales it to fit your screen, saving your hardware some serious heavy lifting. You can push it even further to ‘Ultra Performance,’ but I strongly advise against it. At Ultra Performance, the image quality degrades significantly, leaving you with a muddy, blurry mess that ruins the beautiful sci-fi aesthetic of the game. Stick to standard Performance mode if you want to actually see what you are shooting at.
Stutters, Drops, and Broken Features
Even with everything dialed down to the absolute minimum, the experience was incredibly rough. The game suffers from severe stuttering. You might be walking down a corridor, enjoying a relatively stable 30 frames per second (FPS), and then suddenly, without warning, it dips to 15 FPS. These instant, jarring drops completely shatter your immersion. When you are navigating intense moments—like trying to block an airlock, avoiding a Protogen ship, or calling for a medic during a frantic firefight—those frame drops can mean the difference between surviving an encounter and staring at a ‘Game Over’ screen.
Interestingly, the game’s menu does feature a toggle for frame generation. In theory, frame generation is a miracle worker for handhelds, using AI to insert extra frames and smooth out gameplay. Unfortunately, in this current beta build, the frame generation feature is completely broken. Toggling it on does absolutely nothing to alleviate the performance woes. It is a frustrating tease, but it is also a reminder that this is exactly what betas are for: finding what is broken so the developers can fix it before the official launch.
The Savior: Lossless Scaling
Just when I was about to throw in the towel and declare the game a lost cause on the Steam Deck, I remembered a handy little utility that has saved me more times than I can count: Lossless Scaling. If you are gaming on a Steam Deck or a ROG Ally and you have not looked into Lossless Scaling, you are missing out on a massive performance booster.
Lossless Scaling is a brilliant third-party application available on Steam that forces advanced window scaling and frame generation on games that either do not support it natively or, in this case, have broken native implementations. I booted it up, applied it to the game, and the difference was night and day. Suddenly, the unplayable stutter-fest transformed into a surprisingly smooth experience. With Lossless Scaling active, I was actually hitting between 50 and 60 FPS during various segments of my gameplay. The combat felt responsive, the camera movements were fluid, and I could finally appreciate the tension of the game’s atmosphere without getting distracted by a slideshow framerate.
The Unreal Engine Factor
It is worth noting that this game is built on Unreal Engine. While Unreal Engine is a powerhouse capable of delivering some of the most stunning visuals in modern gaming, it has a bit of a reputation when it comes to the Steam Deck. Unreal Engine games often struggle with shader compilation stutters and heavy resource demands on portable hardware. We have seen it time and time again with new releases.
Given that context, the fact that the game runs as well as it does with a little third-party help is actually somewhat promising. The foundation is there. What we really need now is for the developers to push some optimization patches. If they can fix the native frame generation and perhaps implement FSR 3 instead of relying on the outdated FSR 1, I genuinely believe this game could become a fantastic experience on the Steam Deck. FSR 3’s advanced upscaling and native frame generation would likely eliminate the need for third-party apps entirely.
The High Barrier to Entry
Now, if my talk of Lossless Scaling and 60 FPS has you itching to try the beta yourself, I need to warn you about the barrier to entry. Getting access to this beta is not as simple as clicking a ‘Request Access’ button on Steam. In fact, it is quite an expensive process.
To play the beta, you have to go directly to the developer’s website and purchase a specific early access pack priced at $80. Yes, you read that right: eighty dollars. Once you make the purchase, you have to wait for an email containing a Steam key, which you then redeem on the platform to download the game. It is a steep asking price for a game that is still in a rough, unoptimized state, and the fact that you cannot just buy it directly through the Steam store adds an annoying layer of friction.
Final Thoughts
So, is the $80 beta worth it right now for a Steam Deck player? Honestly, unless you are a die-hard fan of the genre who absolutely cannot wait to test the waters, I would recommend holding off. The native performance is simply too rough to justify the price tag at this exact moment. However, if you already have access, or if you are playing on a beefy desktop rig and just want to take it on the go occasionally, Lossless Scaling is absolutely your best friend.
Despite the technical headaches, there is a genuinely intriguing game buried under the stuttering and broken settings. The intense sci-fi setting, the desperate firefights, and the atmospheric exploration all point toward a game with massive potential. I am incredibly excited to see how the developers continue to optimize this title. With the right patches and proper upscaling support, this could easily become a standout title for portable gamers. Until then, I will be keeping my Steam Deck close, my Lossless Scaling app ready, and my eyes peeled for the next update.
