By The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is finally here, and it’s already pulled in more than 120,000 players at once, around 100,000 more than its average over the previous 30 days. After spending some time with it on the Steam Deck, I can see why. The graphics aren’t hugely different on the Deck, especially on the Steam Deck preset, but performance is a clear step up, even compared to the previous remaster.
Best Steam Deck settings
The setup that gave me a very good and pretty stable experience was:
- Graphics preset: Steam Deck
- Anti-aliasing: FSR, Quality (fixed mode)
- Dynamic resolution scaling: Off
Performance on Steam Deck
With those settings I was sitting between 40 and 60 frames per second a lot of the time. It does bounce around quite a bit within that range, but I didn’t really see it dip under 40, even at night and when fighting several enemies at once. It wasn’t much of an issue during the day either, where I took down a wyvern and a couple of harpies without any trouble. I’m still fairly early into the game, but so far it’s both better performing and better looking than the previous remaster.
The one thing that takes a bit of getting used to is a new level of micro stutter. I could feel it directly on the Steam Deck, and it shows up in the frame time graph too. Hopefully a few patches will smooth this out even more.
Mako frame generation
If you want to push things further, Mako frame generation easily doubles that 45 to 50 FPS base up to around the 90 mark with little effort. That means you can hit a smooth 90 on the Steam Deck OLED and 60 on the Steam Deck LCD. For what it’s worth, the only fight I lost was with frame gen enabled, though I may have just got a bit cocky.
Final thoughts
CD Projekt Red have done a really good job with this one. Performance is very impressive on the Steam Deck, the graphics are a nice step up from the previous version, and the micro stutter is the only real blemish. I’ll also be testing it on the Steam Machine soon, so keep an eye out for that.
