Update: I just tested all 4 presets with the Co-Op mod, and tested with DXVK_ASYNC again just in case. Performance is still within margin of error, so this is 100% an engine limitation and NOT anti-cheat.
@@McVerdict Hey, thanks for watching! I wasn't aware that Decky impacted performance negatively, and I didn't notice a major difference post-install, is there a known issue for it?
Just for info: you don't need all this Big letters and %command% line....simply put "-dxvk_async=1" (whithout quotes) and it's working ;) Way more faster and simple to enter (I learn this in the steam OS tuto on an official page on valve's site, they're is a lot if others command lines which can help too for compatibility issues ;)) And imo swap trick is useless, just the vram expansion is needed ;)
@@mikaeldannenberger6 Good tip, I thought it needed to be an environment variable and not a parameter, thanks! The swap fix is marked as optional in my presets for that reason. I left it that way so people knew they didn't need to revert the fix to default and performance was identical. Thank you for watching!
Your channel is exactly what I was looking for when I was trying to minmax settings for that 40fps optimization, good stuff, hope you continue to do this for years to come
You are a legend. I was going to refresh myself on what all the CryoUtilities settings do, but I basically got a refresher course _and suggestions_ in one video! Thanks so much for all your time and work, and I hope you're doing well and enjoying the DLC!
I wanted to say that I've seen alot of Steam Deck related channels pop up and this is the only one I've been interested in and subscribed to. I appreciate what you're putting out into the world.
@@Spencerwalker21 Yup! I mentioned disabling SMT in the video, but I also tried using 2, 4 and 6 cores. Fewer than 4 and you get drops, 4 and 6 and you don't have any gain.
@@cryobyte33 I tried 1080p docked even with everything low or off it ran like a horrible switch port and could barely hit 30fps with frequent dips into low 20s. Knew it was going to be like that but damnit I had to tinker lol
@@Spencerwalker21 lol I don't have a dock to test with so I haven't been able to do deep dives on that. You should be able to get similar perf to my video with 720p though!
Congrats! So happy for you! It seems like you really put a lot of work into these videos and you provide us with such great value. Thank you! Can’t wait for you to get to the HZD and hopefully one day GoW deep dives 🤞🏻
Thanks for the thorough dive into the perf settings; very useful. In a lot of games, I’ve found using high textures, and then dialling down the other settings to gain frames so work really well to keep the game looking nice but running fairly smoothly. Also on the smaller screen, many times you can get away with turning off anti-aliasing and it actually looks better *(sharper)* as things are already being smoothed with FSR. Another thing that helps me with experience quality, is using GShade/Reshade, because you can use things like AdaptiveSharpen, HDR, Some colour/vibrance bumps that drastically improve how nice the game looks; making the lower game settings less noticeable.
Thanks for watching! All great points! I set my "recommended" preset based on exactly that. GShade/ReShade is another possible video in the future, I hadn't thought of using it to blunt the effect of lower quality graphics. Thank you for the suggestions!
@cryobyte33 for your recomended settings i dont belive you stated the resolution you had it running at. Love your videos sir have seen all of them and you are truly a master of your craft.
Hey CryoByte! I think you should always include a single cpmbat encounter in your benchmarks when you are testing games that go hard on special effects because that's when the FPS matters most in a game like Elden Ring. It's also where the FPS fluctuates the most for me! I dig your videos and they help me set games up very quickly. Cant wait for your Totk video!
Thank you for the feedback! I always check that combat encounters are within the expected results as well, I do a lot of testing off screen but only show you guys the simplest benchmark. It's really hard to include a combat encounter in the benchmark itself for lots of games because the fight can go in many different ways, at which point the test differs too much between runs. 🙂 Thank you for watching!
Thank you! This really helped me not obsess over the settings. However, I've played about 16 hours on the deck now and your 'recommended' settings are WAY better at holding 30fps than your 'prettiest' settings in the open world (caves or isolated areas are a non-issue). I wouldn't say there is a noticeable fidelity difference either (bumped AA to high). The frame rate still tanks a bit when lots of enemies are on screen but it's much more stable at medium.
Thank you for watching! This is actually a problem with the latest patch, it seems that engine changes were made when implementing 6-player multiplayer. I intend to make an updated version of this video accommodating for that, along with some new tricks I've learned.
@@cryobyte33 Ooh! Please part onto us these secrets you learned! Thank you so much for these videos, if there are updates to any of these settings you could put them on the description or a pinned comment so as not to make an entirely new video. Or just a short video going over the settings and not the testing, as you already demonstrated how thorough you are and we trust you. Just one quick question: for your recommended setting you’re using native resolution, right?
@@cryobyte33 Yup I checked it out and I'm definitely going to use your script! I'm curious if you saw that valve is implementing trim into the latest update? Do you think there will be any interference between your script and valve? I imagine your script will probably override if installed after the update, but I don't know anything about code or Linux.
@@garretts.2003 I saw and am super happy about it! I think that lack of TRIM was the biggest miss by the Deck team, and I'm choosing to think that my video rushed them along a bit 😉 There's no harm in having both enabled, but the latest version of my script already accounts for it! If you are on SteamOS lower than 3.4, you will still get an option to enable my TRIM-on schedule. If you are on SteamOS 3.4 or higher, my automatic TRIM will be disabled automatically. Immediate TRIM is still an option and runs on /home only. Thank you for watching!
@@cryobyte33 Awesome thanks for the quick reply and everything you're doing for the platform. I definitely look forward to seeing more of your optimisations. And I wouldn't doubt if your video had something to do with the update. Now they just need to see your video on the RDR2 vram issue. Anyways I'm so happy to be getting a steam deck and it's people like you that will continue to make it the best platform it can be and for that I thank you and all the other community coders. And shout out to valve for not locking steam os behind a bunch of firmware like everyone else and supporting right to repair.
Congratulations! This is such a good video, I hoped you would do excatly this. One thing I wonder now... the Coop Mod has an own excecutable that runs without anti cheat from my understanding... so would we get a better performance with the mod? I love the steam deck but hate that elden ring cant run stable 40 fps. :(
Oh, that's actually a fantastic point, thank you! I completely forgot that it disabled anticheat. Maybe a followup video is in order if it changes performance significantly. Thank you for watching and the idea!
@@cryobyte33 hey I tried the potato mod and the remove vignette and other stuff to cranck the FPS up maybe in combination with this you will be able to get a stables 40 fps?
@@kratosmuscle1163 I avoided using that mod in this video because the page mentions that it triggers anticheat, but if I use the coop mod, I may be able to use it after all. I'll definitely give it a look, thank you!
Update: I just tested all 4 presets with the Co-Op mod, and tested with DXVK_ASYNC again just in case. Performance is still within margin of error, so this is 100% an engine limitation and NOT anti-cheat.
this is a really well made video, some of the best performance analysis ive seen on yt! on windows, youre able to disable anticheat by changing the names of the respective exe files. if there's a way to get that to work on the steam deck, do you think that would increase performance in a meaningful way, considering elden ring is a predominantly singleplayer game for most players
Thank you for commenting and watching! In the pinned comment, I actually mentioned that I used the coop mod to disable anticheat and the performance was unfortunately identical.
Weird. I can barely break 40 when using your recommended settings. I used to but I'm not quite sure what's changed. When it's raining and riding around it drops to 29-30
To my knowledge, patch 1.08 affected the performance badly. I haven't had time to revisit it fully, but I'd make sure you're using CryoUtilities 2's recommended settings and see if that helps.
@@cryobyte33 I'm definitely running CU2, maybe I'll reinstall CU2 and see if that helps. I've had to drop down resolution and use FSR but even now. It's so rare to get locked 40
I have already subscribed to most of your channels. I can not see or aware of a more accurate in-depth review “deep dive” on the market. Simply outstanding 👌🏻 You are the only person on RUclips I have for notifications. The deckmaster 😂 Your channels I anticipate will grow exponentially, I find my self full enduldged and wanting to learn. You have a gift. I'm sure the big companies will come knocking on your door at some point with a big cheque #merited
Thank you for the kind words, and for being a subscriber! I'm really happy to teach others, and I love that I'm able to help people play their favorite games on Deck ❤️ As for big companies coming to knock on my door, it better be a pretty good offer, but I'm willing to hear them out 😉
Hi, maybe you can do a follow-up of this video checking the new Dlc? Some say it's hevier than the base game. Thank you very much, keep up the great content you're making!
I used TDP 9W, in-game setting all high except shadow and volumetric to medium. Screen cap at 28. 1024x576 resolution with FSR 2x sharpening. Elden Ring ran mostly solid 28 FPS and can get 2 hours and 50 minutes on battery. No customized on vram and No swap fix.
@@cryobyte33 it's nothing really, it's due to RUclips's compression Tom Scott has a cool video on it (ruclips.net/video/r6Rp-uo6HmI/видео.html) where he uses a confetti filter like yours
I've been just doing 720p all high settings mostly 30 but heavy foliage areas with lots of enemies will struggle at mid 20s. I could drop to medium but the dips are still there but not as bad so I said f it full throttle kept the high settings lol
I played a decent chunk nailing the presets I gave you, try out the "prettiest" option if you want to get rid of most of those drops 😉 Thank you for watching!
i am really enjoying your content on these deep dives. I would like to add a recommendation that could further expand on CPU utilization and that would be installing PowerTools and disabling SMT on the Hyperthreaded cores and just using the 4 physical. Mainly this is used to help with emulation and makes a big difference, but i have not seen it done yet with Elden Ring
Hey, thanks for watching! I actually mentioned at the end of the presets section that I tried disabling SMT and altering clock speeds, although I didn’t mention PowerTools it’s what I used. Unfortunately it didn’t help or hurry performance, so it got a footnote rather than a full section🙂
Update: I just tested all 4 presets with the Co-Op mod, and tested with DXVK_ASYNC again just in case. Performance is still within margin of error, so this is 100% an engine limitation and NOT anti-cheat.
Interesting thing that I encountered when trying to implement these settings today. If I select the 'Medium' preset, it defaults the "Anti aliasing" value to "Low". Then if I exit the game and restart, it hangs on a white screen. When I launch the game, the "Medium" present is still enabled, but the Anti Aliasing value is now on "High". After further testing, any time I change the Anti-aliasing setting to anything other than 'High' the game I see the behaviour above. This is a fresh install as of today, following all of Cryobyte's recommendations. Anyone else seeing this? EDIT: If it matters, I'm on 'Borderless Windowed', 1280x800, 'Auto-adjust' (forget what it's called) is set to 'Off'.
For anyone reading this, I'm also interested! I literally JUST uninstalled this and didn't notice, but I set my settings immediately after booting the game each time 🤔
The issue with GPU fixed clock speed is the TDP is shared with the CPU and that lowers the CPU clocks which Elden Ring is not thread heavy but actually IPC heavy. I discovered that a few weeks ago.
Yeah, unfortunately I couldn't get CPU usage to go higher, even limiting the GPU to 400Mhz and pinning the CPU at 3500Mhz on 4 cores with SMT disabled. Thank you for watching and contributing!
Dxvk async main benefit is that if you run that command, you can delete all shader cache and disable it whilst having smooth performance without any of your storage being used to store cache. I use it on every single game single player or multiplayer and have only had an issue with anti cheat In 1 single game, and that was insurgency lol. I recommend everyone use the command and disable pre caching, it saved me over 20gb of storage. Also it only works on proton ge
Hey, I mentioned this in another comment, but I followed all those steps and used GE but completely forgot to mention it in the video. Even after making those changes, my frames were identical. Thank you for watching!
Question. In your Recommended preset, you don't mention what TDP we should be using. Is it correct to assume that instead of manually setting the TDP, we just leave the Deck to handle it? What about Scaling? Do we keep the FSR from the previous settings you tackled, or do we revert it to Linear for the Recommended settings?
Sorry for being unclear, if the setting isn’t mentioned then it’s assumed to be at default, in this case automatic TDP and linear scanning 🙂 Thank you for watching, I’ll try to be more clear about that in the future!
Hi, can you take a look at if there are any benefits and/or disadvantages between the default settings of 4core/8threads vs disabling hyperthreading in terms of power efficiency and performance. See if there's any content you can make into a video there. Thanks!
Hey, I actually did mention doing this in the section at 13:05. Disabling SMT (AMD Hyperthreading) and only using 2, 4 or 6 cores was part of my testing and had identical results with 4 and 6 cores. 2 cores had major frame drops. In addition, for Elden Ring in particular, I noticed no power draw differences over a 20 minute period. Thank you for watching!
I told you tiny Programm with the best settings and fixes for games would be awesome, with presets to choose or a custom plugin woukd be awesome. Do you know custom plugins ? I use the for more vibrant colours or theming or to see protondb rating icon on every game preview picture.
You did tell me that, although I was using it prior to your comment 🙂 I've tested every plugin in their store. Fantastic and PowerTools are my favorites since they let me test more stuff! Thank you for watching!
Aww, that's unfortunate. We can only hope proton or from themselves offer some improvements in the future I suppose, maybe when dlc drops but seems somewhat unlikely. Nice to see more videos by you, especially since I had a particular interest on this one, keep it up. You clearly did your homework with this one.
Thanks for watching! A few commenters mentioned the coop mod disabling anti-cheat, which I forgot about, so I'll be testing that soon. Stay tuned to see if I get more performance!
Yeah, I saw some of those. I'm curious if it'll help. It'd be kind of ironic, since I have my own opinions about people circumventing from's multiplayer checks and balances. Always figured this might be one of those things that they'd have to fix on their end, if at all.
@@Smuggers. Update: I just tested all 4 presets with the Co-Op mod, and tested with DXVK_ASYNC again just in case. Performance is still within margin of error, so this is 100% an engine limitation.
@@cryobyte33 tbh I bought the game once again for my pc and asked for a refund immediately after. The games is full of stutters even in the main menu which shows how poorly optimised it is. I still haven’t received my deck (ordered two days ago and not shipped yet) and I will eventuality buy the game again for the deck. Sure I wait till the price drop significantly because I’m not going to pay 40-60€ for this unoptimised mess 😂
@@shattia Yeah, I have a 3080Ti and can barely manage a stable 60 with my ultrawide, it's horrible how badly the engine is optimized 😞 It's still an amazing game, but they REALLY need to finally figure out the issues, they're not the tiny "Armored Core" studio anymore.
I have everything set to high and then I just put Shadows to medium and grass to medium and it locked at 30 FPS with no dips ever, this is with your recommended settings for cryoutilities and the 4 gigs of vram. I've been enjoying it and honestly you don't really notice 30fps after you've been playing it for a few hours.
DXVK_ASYNC=1 is useful for non-steam games because it reduces if not eliminates the stutter caused by shader compilation, a step that isn't necessary on Steam games because Steam automatically downloads pre-compiled shaders for them.
This is a good point that I overlooked. I admit to only having a surface-level familiarity with DXVK_ASYNC, but I'm learning more every day. Thank you for both teaching me something new, and for watching!
I came up with a crazy* idea: Use almost your recommend settings, but capping at 30 to have a nice balance between battery saving and visual fidelity. That is: Medium preset, high textures, low anti-aliasing, depth of field and shadow quality left on medium preset's default and instead putting shader quality on low with 60Hz, allow tearing on, frame cap at 30 FPS and TDP Limit at 10. Obviously while using all off CryoUtilities' recommended settings ;-) Will need more testing, but a first walk through Limgrave at Late night during rain killing randoms with torches was using between 13 and 15 Watts while having a flatlined frametime graph at 30. Assuming an average power consumption of 15 Watts I can play this game with nice looking visuals for 2h 40min, which I personally think is spectacular :D
Great deep dive, but something you didn't mention that surprised me was that the default resolution of 1280x800 on the SD screen gets automatically letterboxed to 720 for some asinine reason. Doesn't that make the 800p setting a useless waste of extra power over 720p, since (according to what I've read) the game still renders at 800p but literally covers it up with the black bars? Admittedly I haven't done any real benchmarking so I'm not certain of the difference
Heya, thanks for watching! This was one of my earliest videos, so I was definitely still learning what to include, sorry for the omission. That said, you're correct, the game will render at full res and then fake letterbox. It actually does the same thing on my ultrawide monitor, and there are mods to remove the bars completely. However, resolution scaling in Elden Ring is notoriously bad, and reducing the resolution down to absolute minimum, or even further with mods, doesn't actually grant better performance. It seems that the engine is almost entirely CPU dependent, and until a resolution of 1080p, there's no real difference in frame rates whatsoever. I haven't gone back and done more thorough testing, so I don't have any numbers on hand, but I've played a decent amount and noticed no major differences between setting the resolution to 720p or 800p, although that's hardly a scientific test 😅 Regardless, thank you again for watching!
@@cryobyte33 That's very interesting. I suppose I'll leave it on the default 800p if it sucks either way lol. If only i could mod this game without giving up online too. The text size on the SD screen is a real killer for Elden Ring
RDR2 deep dive please kind sir ! I’m struggling right now with the settings to get a locked 30fps with good enough fidelity, using my Nreal Air glasses. I tried to push to 1080p but it’s too demanding, with around 25fps on average. I pushed it back to 720p and use FSR with sharpness on 5 but now I get strange artifacts around my character when moving…
Thanks for watching! Another vote for RDR2 added 👍 FSR adds that "halo" effect, very similar to DLSS 1.0. Hopefully I can shed some light on the performance 🙂
I just booted Elden Ring back up on my Deck after a while and I just noticed that it performs better than it used to (at least when CPU limited). In the exact same spot that I used to get 40-41fps, I'm now getting around 46fps, both tests on lowest settings and resolution. I'm not sure what the cause is though, because inbetween there was the update to CryoUtilities 2.0, some SteamOS updates and the Elden Ring update today. Just wanted to know if you can confirm a recent improvement in performance for Elden Ring.
I don't have it installed, and also didn't even know there was an update today 😅 It looks like "Several performance improvements and other bug fixes." is in the patch notes, but I've also heard that some people say CU2 works for it as well. AS such let's chalk it up to "both, probably" 😉
I just tried ER using CU and all your setting and idk why but I can barely hold 40FPS even at low settings. Especially on Altus Plateau the game even drops below 30 sometimes. I have 16GB swapfix and everything set as you recommended.
I really enjoy these videos. Great job. But damn all this effort when if you have a decent gaming PC already or an Xbox Series or PS5, which I understand everyone doesn’t, you can just do local game streaming on moonlight, remote play or PS remote play. Can super sample at higher resolutions to the steam deck at 60 fps ultra settings and get 5-6 hours of battery life. Downsides you can’t leave your house, not an issue for me because 99% of my steam deck time is couch play at home. Keep making these videos though they’re super interesting.
Thank you for watching! I don't mind the effort, and I think that the Deck has the potential to be the "one console" for many people in the future. I like remote streaming, but the latency can be finicky in some games, sometimes the console is being used by my wife, etc. Also yeah, you're limited to areas in your own house with decent wifi coverage 😅
Would you be willing to look into the Xbox Elite Series 2 firmware issues? Apparently the deck used to recognize the ES2 as a unique device, then MS did a firmware update that makes it just show up as "Xbox Wireless Controller" now. Is it possible to fix this on the Linux side, it's clear MS doesn't care to fix it. It's important because it removed the paddles from being programmable on deck. You can still use the paddles, if you program them through the Xbox or PC, but not directly through the deck options. Curious on your opinion since you are an experienced Linux Developer.
I can definitely look into it, but based on what you describe it sounds like either Steam Input or the HID portion of the kernel needs an update, which Valve will need to implement. That said, I do have an Elite Series 2, so I may try to get some time to look at it in the coming days and let you know if I find anything useful 🤞
@@cryobyte33 You're awesome. Lots of chatter on reddit about getting the paddles to natively work. Might be a popular video if you could find a fix. To give you some insight into why I specifically want this; Using my Series Elite 2 for PS5 games. 1) Remote play in with Chiaki 2) Use Series 2 as controller 3) Set a paddle to the lightbar button. 4) Still use primary TV as display, just leave the deck running to use the controller. Been doing this on iphone, the only problem is you lose the lightbar button, which for some PS5 games *like GoW* you use it a lot. So if I could program a different button to the PS lightbar on the Series 2, I could get native support on PS5 games. I can't use the Dual Sense it kills my hands. But doing this on my iphone I get no noticeable input lag, just can't edit my controller buttons. My backup plan is to just use a dual shock 4 instead this way on iPhone. That controller at least doesn't cause hand cramping and joint pain for me.
I don't have my steam deck yet, but on PC I've generally found that this game does get a consistency boost by deleting anticheat and playing it offline. Also I noticed it tends to hit single core limits on its cpu load. So I get the sense 40 is as much as a single core on the steam deck apu will allow for. It would also explain why maxing gpu would hinder performance bc it takes power away from single core performance.
I tried that and DX11 mode as well (I think I mention it in the pinned comment). Also, Elden Ring seemed to spread performance across cores pretty well, so that seems to be an inconsistency from normal PCs too 😅
@@cryobyte33 my pc is running on dx12 and it heavily favors one core even though theres a general usage spread, sometimes it even pegs that core to 100%. Killing anticheat and online functionality made a very noticeable difference on my laptop. There are a lot of weird quirks in this game that still seem to be a bit mysterious but I appreciate how in depth this guide went to offer some solid go to options. When I get my deck I'll definitely refer back to this video 👍
@@cryobyte33 I'm finally playing on Deck, I see what you're saying about an even spread on the cpu cores. I find this veerrry interesting, this is not the way my laptop cpu works with Elden Ring, not at all. It heavily favors 1 core. I wonder why it behaves so differently on deck.
Hey, thanks for watching! I use MangoHUD instead of mangoApp. Install it through the discover store, make a config file using their GitHub as a reference and then enable it with MANGOHUD=1 MANGOHUD_CONFIGFILE=/path/to/config %command% in the launch options for whichever game. That’s also how I gather the performance logs 🙂
Thanks for watching! There's a known issue for BTRFS in the repo right now, the issue is that when you use it, the swap file becomes a swap partition and a symlink. There's a proposed fix, but as I don't have a second deck to work with I haven't been able to test it yet. I'll try to get it fixed in the coming week, but if you want to do it manually you can follow the steps in my Red Dead 2 video, which should theoretically work.
@@cryobyte33 Thank you for looking into this. I think this deleted my swap file on BTRFS and the methods in the guides don't do anything and I need to recreate my swap file. I just don't know how. Everything gives me errors :(
@@ZodiakSL Update, follow the steps in this comment to get back to "stock" BTRFS's swap file: github.com/CryoByte33/steam-deck-swap-resizer/issues/4#issuecomment-1288117054 Then, uninstall the swap resizer and install it again to get the later version, which has BTRFS support as of last night 🙂
@@cryobyte33 I saw that and the comment from popsUlfr from the original guide I followed for BTRFS. Sadly none of it worked. I was happy with BTRFS before that point. It's just something I couldn't resolve without having someone there to talk to. I went back to EXT4 for now but I haven't given up on BTRFS. It appears to be better than EXT4. I haven't given up on BTRFS and will go back to it once the swapfile thing can be resolved. Wonder if there are any FPS improvements with it over EXT4 since everywhere I read that it has speed improvements aswell?
@@ZodiakSL It's definitely possible! I haven't been able to test yet because I only have a single Deck to test with, so one-way operations are a no-go at the moment. It sucks that you had such an issue with it though, hopefully I can eventually make a guide and find the best way to fix these things.
I've put over 170 hours into Elden ring on the deck, and I set everything to highest settings at native resolution. It would lock me at 30 fps of course, and there were a few times it would dip into 15fps when there's a lot of enemies on screen. But just exploring the land between and running around, I wouldn't deem it unplayable. It stayed well above 25fps 90% of the time. I grew up with console games that did this all the time. PS3 games especially would often chug a long and dip to mid 20s, but as long as 90% of the time it's 25fps or higher I could still play the games just fine. I don't play any fast paced games though, so obviously a first person shooter would want more frames, but for most of my gaming 25+ fps is just fine. It's not the best: I would prefer 60...but once you get used to it your brain interpolates the missing frames.
Just a quick note. There is no need to use dxvk-async with DirectX 12 games as dxvk doesn't handle api translation of d3d12. It is instead handled most commonly by vkd3d-proton. So the variable doesn't have an effect here. Keep making steam deck videos tho! :D
@@cryobyte33 rgr rgr. Also note that it isn't a part of the official dxvk and so isn't included in regular Proton. You would need something like Proton-GE which includes it. Tho when dxvk 2.0.0 arives it will have some new work that should help with shader compilation stutter in d3d9 - d3d11 games on systems that have new enough driver. Tho exact benefit varies from game to game. Np. I will continue to try and check out your steam deck videos :)
@@xBlist84 I used GE when recording the video, but completely missed putting it in the script 😅 I haven't heard much about 2.0 yet, excited to see what it brings!
FYI!!! Elden ring uses dx12 as it's graphics api meaning the deck is using VKD3D, *not* DXVK. DXVK-Async isn't working not because it doesn't help more, but because it isn't being loaded in the first place. If you want to try DXVK and what improvements it may entail, you'll have to force and patch the game to run using DX11 instead.
Yea, I learned about this later, I tested after the video release in DX11 mode and got identical results. Sorry about the confusion, and thank you for letting me know!
Hey and thanks for your great videos! I got Elden Ring the other day. Have set it up using your recommended settings for 40fps. As soon as i enter the open world in Limgrave the framerate drops to low/mid 30s. I am using your swapfix and VRAM at 4 GB. Do you have any idea what I could have missed?
Hmmm, with the swap fix and VRAM I was definitely getting rock solid frames, even in Caelid. Maybe the latest updates harmed performance? It's possible that they had to change the engine for the 6p co-op or something 🤔 You may have luck pinning the GPU if the issue is that it needs help, or pinning it lower if the CPU does. I may look into revisiting this deep dive soon-ish if I get the time, I've learned a lot since filming and might be able to get even better performance, especially if they're making engine updates. Regardless, I'm sorry that you're not getting a good framerate and I hope that it's temporary 😞
@CryoByte33 Thank you for an extremely quick reply! I'll tinker a bit more and hope for the best. Looking forward to the Witcher 3 video and hopefully a revisited Elden Ring one! 😀
@@e1m0h At the time of testing I didn't have an SD card, so I'm unsure. It's possible, especially when doing asset swaps while running quickly, but it's unlikely to affect performance while standing in 1 area.
@CryoByte33 Tried moving the game to the internal drive. No difference as far as I can tell. I will play the game at 30 fps which seems really solid if I use your 30 fps settings as a base and then lowers a couple of settings. Thanks again for all your hard work. (Ha en riktigt god jul!) 🎅
I don't know for sure but I know the steam deck has power limits of 15W, which could be a reason why you cannot get more frames as CPU and GPU together is taking all the power even the percentage is not 100% on either of them.
That's definitely true, but the CPU has a decent amount of headroom and the whole deck was only drawing 11.5 watts average. The issue had me pulling my hair out for a week 😂 Thank you for watching, and chipping in with ideas!
Wooooow, this is what I say "hard work" 🎉 Analysis, charts, drill-downs, calculation of bottleneck's. This is like "Avengers" from the world of system analysis! ❤
I personally never lock frames. I just hate the resulting input lag. allowing tearing doesnt help either for me. I rather have unlocked fluctuating frames tbh.
Congratulations and thanks for those deep dives videos, they really help a lot ! And I would love to see one on RDR2 first since I will probably be continuing my PC playthrough of that one on the deck soonish (maybe while installing some mods hehe)
Hey, thanks for watching the video! This deep dive was made before I had dedicated videos on it, but I do now. Check out my video "EASY & SAFE Health & Performance Boosts" where I give an explanation of all the tips I shared in this video, and more 🙂
This was recorded about 6 months ago, so more recent patches could have changed it, but I didn't do anything special for it! It also might have to do with ambient temperatures, since I keep my apartment between 17-18 Celsius.
Fantastic deep-dive, you got a new subscriber. Thx for your Swap/VRam suggestions. I have used them to improve BeamNG and it has been very impressive. I can run pretty much any scenario or map, I can even add traffic. Of course performance is a joke (17fps) but previously the Deck supports only very basic scenarios. I’d love a deep dive on BeamNG.
Thanks for the sub, the watch, and the recommendation! 😄 I do own BeamNG but I haven't booted it in years, I'll add it to the list of deep dives for sure.
Great, I know you will spot stuff I miss… BeamNG is seriously GPU and RAM bound. I was amazed how much difference your mods made. Of course finding a decent frame rate is very important (and elusive :-). Thanks again.
Hello, thank you for your work! I'd love to hear about RDR 2 because I saw a video on reddit of someone having fps issues when expanding VRAM to 4gb. It's interesting that the game works better when it's have a 1gb
Thanks for watching! I actually have a video on Red Dead 2 already, but it was made before the latest Deck update. If you watch it, use the video "Easy Performance Boosts for the Steam Deck", also on my channel. It has an updated process for my swap fix, and might be able to get you the performance you're looking for before I can release a new video 🙂
Update: I just tested all 4 presets with the Co-Op mod, and tested with DXVK_ASYNC again just in case. Performance is still within margin of error, so this is 100% an engine limitation and NOT anti-cheat.
Hello not sure if you will see this but was wondering if you knew about decky loader and if it makes performance worse having it installed
@@McVerdict Hey, thanks for watching! I wasn't aware that Decky impacted performance negatively, and I didn't notice a major difference post-install, is there a known issue for it?
Just for info: you don't need all this Big letters and %command% line....simply put "-dxvk_async=1" (whithout quotes) and it's working ;)
Way more faster and simple to enter (I learn this in the steam OS tuto on an official page on valve's site, they're is a lot if others command lines which can help too for compatibility issues ;))
And imo swap trick is useless, just the vram expansion is needed ;)
@@mikaeldannenberger6 Good tip, I thought it needed to be an environment variable and not a parameter, thanks!
The swap fix is marked as optional in my presets for that reason. I left it that way so people knew they didn't need to revert the fix to default and performance was identical.
Thank you for watching!
I was really curious about co-op mod so thanks for the update!
Your channel is exactly what I was looking for when I was trying to minmax settings for that 40fps optimization, good stuff, hope you continue to do this for years to come
Thank you for the kind words! I hope to as well 😄
This is on par with digital foundry and Hardware Unboxed levels of benchmarking. Great job
Thank you so much, you flatter me 😭
@@cryobyte33 when it comes to Steam Deck, you're even better :)
Amazing work. Waiting for my deck to be delivered. Your videos will be life savers!!
Thank you so much for the super, let me know how the fixes work out for you!
Great work dude! Keep working, and making videos, I wish you best bro!
Thank you so much for watching, the kind words and the Super! I'll keep them coming 😄
@@cryobyte33 I hope to see more Steam deck videos like this! Also If you don't mind - was it tested and recorded on 1.0.6 or 1.0.7 version o the game?
@@salat12k This was on 1.0.7, I started recording the day after it went live 🙂
You are a legend. I was going to refresh myself on what all the CryoUtilities settings do, but I basically got a refresher course _and suggestions_ in one video! Thanks so much for all your time and work, and I hope you're doing well and enjoying the DLC!
Your channel is quickly becoming one of my favorites! DF level of analysis but specifically for the deck. Thanks for the video!
Thank you so much for the kind words, and for watching! Being compared to DF is something I never thought would happen 😭
I wanted to say that I've seen alot of Steam Deck related channels pop up and this is the only one I've been interested in and subscribed to.
I appreciate what you're putting out into the world.
Thank you so much for the kind words, subscribing, and for watching! 😄
Love your channel! Keep it up!
Thank you so much for the support!
Your channel is sort of the Digital Foundry for Steam Deck users, great content!
Thank you for the kind words and for watching! ❤️
your videos are super cool man. No one else is going in depth like you do, look forward to watchin this one
Thank you so much, I hope you enjoy it!
@@cryobyte33 have you tried parking CPU cores I forget the exact term but it basically make the CPU run 2 cores 4 threads instead of 4 cores 8 threads
@@Spencerwalker21 Yup! I mentioned disabling SMT in the video, but I also tried using 2, 4 and 6 cores. Fewer than 4 and you get drops, 4 and 6 and you don't have any gain.
@@cryobyte33 I tried 1080p docked even with everything low or off it ran like a horrible switch port and could barely hit 30fps with frequent dips into low 20s. Knew it was going to be like that but damnit I had to tinker lol
@@Spencerwalker21 lol I don't have a dock to test with so I haven't been able to do deep dives on that. You should be able to get similar perf to my video with 720p though!
instant sub, this was one of the most impressive and informative in-depth videos regarding er on the deck!👏
Congrats! So happy for you! It seems like you really put a lot of work into these videos and you provide us with such great value. Thank you! Can’t wait for you to get to the HZD and hopefully one day GoW deep dives 🤞🏻
Don't worry, they're on my shortlist after your previous request!
Thank you so much for the continued support!
This is my first ever super like. Thanks for the deep dives! PLEASE stay techie! Forza FTW!
Thank you so much, I really appreciate it!
I'm going to keep them coming, and I've counted your vote ❤️
Getting back into ER on the Deck on my commute and this video has helped immensely. Thanks
Thank you for watching, I'm glad to have helped!
Thanks for the thorough dive into the perf settings; very useful. In a lot of games, I’ve found using high textures, and then dialling down the other settings to gain frames so work really well to keep the game looking nice but running fairly smoothly. Also on the smaller screen, many times you can get away with turning off anti-aliasing and it actually looks better *(sharper)* as things are already being smoothed with FSR. Another thing that helps me with experience quality, is using GShade/Reshade, because you can use things like AdaptiveSharpen, HDR, Some colour/vibrance bumps that drastically improve how nice the game looks; making the lower game settings less noticeable.
Thanks for watching!
All great points! I set my "recommended" preset based on exactly that. GShade/ReShade is another possible video in the future, I hadn't thought of using it to blunt the effect of lower quality graphics.
Thank you for the suggestions!
@cryobyte33 for your recomended settings i dont belive you stated the resolution you had it running at. Love your videos sir have seen all of them and you are truly a master of your craft.
Gratz on partner bro!!!!!
You are doing really good work, thank you so much.
You deserve every bit of support.
Thank you so much for the kind words, the sub, and the watch! ❤️
The best in-depth videos of the deck in all RUclips, awesome work.
Thank you for watching, and the kind words!
I love that I get better performance from these videos and have learned so much about bottlenecks and general game function.
Super useful video man. I'm so glad that SD have so engaged community!
Thank you so much for watching!
Incredibly produced video. Informative, clear, and gives viewer exactly what they need.
Hey CryoByte! I think you should always include a single cpmbat encounter in your benchmarks when you are testing games that go hard on special effects because that's when the FPS matters most in a game like Elden Ring. It's also where the FPS fluctuates the most for me! I dig your videos and they help me set games up very quickly. Cant wait for your Totk video!
Thank you for the feedback! I always check that combat encounters are within the expected results as well, I do a lot of testing off screen but only show you guys the simplest benchmark. It's really hard to include a combat encounter in the benchmark itself for lots of games because the fight can go in many different ways, at which point the test differs too much between runs. 🙂
Thank you for watching!
Thank you! This really helped me not obsess over the settings. However, I've played about 16 hours on the deck now and your 'recommended' settings are WAY better at holding 30fps than your 'prettiest' settings in the open world (caves or isolated areas are a non-issue). I wouldn't say there is a noticeable fidelity difference either (bumped AA to high). The frame rate still tanks a bit when lots of enemies are on screen but it's much more stable at medium.
Thank you for watching!
This is actually a problem with the latest patch, it seems that engine changes were made when implementing 6-player multiplayer. I intend to make an updated version of this video accommodating for that, along with some new tricks I've learned.
@@cryobyte33 Ooh! Please part onto us these secrets you learned! Thank you so much for these videos, if there are updates to any of these settings you could put them on the description or a pinned comment so as not to make an entirely new video. Or just a short video going over the settings and not the testing, as you already demonstrated how thorough you are and we trust you. Just one quick question: for your recommended setting you’re using native resolution, right?
Great work, great help. I don't have a Deck yet but will soon buy. This is the kind of videos i was looking for. Subscribed.
Thank you for subbing and watching the video!
Thanks man! My steam deck shows up tomorrow and this is going to help a ton! I'm gonna look up those vram and swap fixes.
Check out my video "EASY & SAFE Health & Performance Boosts | Steam Deck" to get the latest version and some explanations!
Thank you for watching!
@@cryobyte33 Yup I checked it out and I'm definitely going to use your script! I'm curious if you saw that valve is implementing trim into the latest update? Do you think there will be any interference between your script and valve? I imagine your script will probably override if installed after the update, but I don't know anything about code or Linux.
@@garretts.2003 I saw and am super happy about it! I think that lack of TRIM was the biggest miss by the Deck team, and I'm choosing to think that my video rushed them along a bit 😉
There's no harm in having both enabled, but the latest version of my script already accounts for it!
If you are on SteamOS lower than 3.4, you will still get an option to enable my TRIM-on schedule.
If you are on SteamOS 3.4 or higher, my automatic TRIM will be disabled automatically.
Immediate TRIM is still an option and runs on /home only.
Thank you for watching!
@@cryobyte33 Awesome thanks for the quick reply and everything you're doing for the platform. I definitely look forward to seeing more of your optimisations. And I wouldn't doubt if your video had something to do with the update. Now they just need to see your video on the RDR2 vram issue.
Anyways I'm so happy to be getting a steam deck and it's people like you that will continue to make it the best platform it can be and for that I thank you and all the other community coders. And shout out to valve for not locking steam os behind a bunch of firmware like everyone else and supporting right to repair.
Fantastic job on this video! I hope you keep doing this for other titles!
Thank you for watching! I've done 6 more since this video came out and don't plan on stopping 🙂
that's a really deep dive. Thanks a lot and looking forward to see RDR2 video as I just started to play it with both VRAM and Swap fix onboard
Thank you for watching! I don't use the term "Deep Dive" lightly 😉
Congratulations! This is such a good video, I hoped you would do excatly this. One thing I wonder now... the Coop Mod has an own excecutable that runs without anti cheat from my understanding... so would we get a better performance with the mod? I love the steam deck but hate that elden ring cant run stable 40 fps. :(
Oh, that's actually a fantastic point, thank you! I completely forgot that it disabled anticheat. Maybe a followup video is in order if it changes performance significantly.
Thank you for watching and the idea!
I was thinking the same thing the whole time!
@@cryobyte33 hey I tried the potato mod and the remove vignette and other stuff to cranck the FPS up maybe in combination with this you will be able to get a stables 40 fps?
@@kratosmuscle1163 I avoided using that mod in this video because the page mentions that it triggers anticheat, but if I use the coop mod, I may be able to use it after all.
I'll definitely give it a look, thank you!
Update: I just tested all 4 presets with the Co-Op mod, and tested with DXVK_ASYNC again just in case. Performance is still within margin of error, so this is 100% an engine limitation and NOT anti-cheat.
this is a really well made video, some of the best performance analysis ive seen on yt! on windows, youre able to disable anticheat by changing the names of the respective exe files. if there's a way to get that to work on the steam deck, do you think that would increase performance in a meaningful way, considering elden ring is a predominantly singleplayer game for most players
Thank you for commenting and watching!
In the pinned comment, I actually mentioned that I used the coop mod to disable anticheat and the performance was unfortunately identical.
Great job. What a lot of hard work!
Thank you for watching!
Loving these deep dive videos, keep 'em coming!
Thank you so much for watching! I really enjoy doing them, so I have no plans to stop 🙂
@@cryobyte33 Congrats on getting partnered, by the way!
Great video, thanks for doing all of the different tests.
Thank you for watching!
I'm following the guide exactly but im getting mostly mid to low thirties on everything, should i use an older version of proton?
Weird. I can barely break 40 when using your recommended settings. I used to but I'm not quite sure what's changed. When it's raining and riding around it drops to 29-30
To my knowledge, patch 1.08 affected the performance badly. I haven't had time to revisit it fully, but I'd make sure you're using CryoUtilities 2's recommended settings and see if that helps.
@@cryobyte33 I'm definitely running CU2, maybe I'll reinstall CU2 and see if that helps. I've had to drop down resolution and use FSR but even now. It's so rare to get locked 40
I have already subscribed to most of your channels. I can not see or aware of a more accurate in-depth review “deep dive” on the market. Simply outstanding 👌🏻 You are the only person on RUclips I have for notifications. The deckmaster 😂 Your channels I anticipate will grow exponentially, I find my self full enduldged and wanting to learn. You have a gift. I'm sure the big companies will come knocking on your door at some point with a big cheque #merited
Thank you for the kind words, and for being a subscriber! I'm really happy to teach others, and I love that I'm able to help people play their favorite games on Deck ❤️
As for big companies coming to knock on my door, it better be a pretty good offer, but I'm willing to hear them out 😉
Thank you for the video! I'd love to see an updated deep dive of RDR2, especially with presets you come up with.
Thank you for watching, your vote has been counted!
thank you a lot for this, I haven't seen a lot of channels expand on low power deck gaming, most just limit to saying it runs good at 15w
Thanks for watching! I add a “battery saver” mode into all of my deep dives , so I’m happy that some like to see them 😄
@@cryobyte33 yeah I really do appreciate it, most often I'll sacrifice a little bit of graphics to get the best battery life so this is really helpful
nice work! I've really been enjoying your content!
Thank you for watching!
Great content man!
Thank you for watching!
Hi, maybe you can do a follow-up of this video checking the new Dlc? Some say it's hevier than the base game. Thank you very much, keep up the great content you're making!
I used TDP 9W, in-game setting all high except shadow and volumetric to medium. Screen cap at 28. 1024x576 resolution with FSR 2x sharpening. Elden Ring ran mostly solid 28 FPS and can get 2 hours and 50 minutes on battery. No customized on vram and No swap fix.
Awesome! I'm all for playing how you want to, I just want to give people the most options 🙂 Thank you for watching!
yus! I'm super excited to see your deep dive on RDR2
Thanks for watching! Your vote has been counted 😄
congratulations
side note, I love how the confetti just trash the quality of the video for a second xD
Oh god, did it? It was fine locally 😨
Well, too late now, thanks for watching!
@@cryobyte33 it's nothing really, it's due to RUclips's compression Tom Scott has a cool video on it (ruclips.net/video/r6Rp-uo6HmI/видео.html) where he uses a confetti filter like yours
@@BankruptGreek Ah yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for the link!
I've been just doing 720p all high settings mostly 30 but heavy foliage areas with lots of enemies will struggle at mid 20s. I could drop to medium but the dips are still there but not as bad so I said f it full throttle kept the high settings lol
I played a decent chunk nailing the presets I gave you, try out the "prettiest" option if you want to get rid of most of those drops 😉
Thank you for watching!
This is exactly the kind of content I want
Thank you so much for watching, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
i am really enjoying your content on these deep dives.
I would like to add a recommendation that could further expand on CPU utilization and that would be installing PowerTools and disabling SMT on the Hyperthreaded cores and just using the 4 physical.
Mainly this is used to help with emulation and makes a big difference, but i have not seen it done yet with Elden Ring
Hey, thanks for watching!
I actually mentioned at the end of the presets section that I tried disabling SMT and altering clock speeds, although I didn’t mention PowerTools it’s what I used. Unfortunately it didn’t help or hurry performance, so it got a footnote rather than a full section🙂
The Seamless Coop Mod by Luke Yui removes Easy Anti-Cheat, and it does work on Deck, so that could be used to test Elden Ring without EAC.
A few other comments have mentioned this, I had completely forgotten about it! 😅
I'll be testing it soon, so stay tuned!
Update: I just tested all 4 presets with the Co-Op mod, and tested with DXVK_ASYNC again just in case. Performance is still within margin of error, so this is 100% an engine limitation and NOT anti-cheat.
great video hopefully you make more steam deck videos!
Thank you for watching! Check my channel out, I have many 😉
Wow okay. I've come around. This is good work.
Nice to have all the data.
Thank you for checking it out post-recommendation, I appreciate it 🙂
Thanks for your hard work 🤙
Thank you for watching, I hope it helped!
Happy holidays!
you are so underrated. Look forward to you testing more AAA
Thank you so much! Next time will be a deep dive on either RDR2 or Forza Horizon 5 🙂
Great video. Thanks❤
Thank you for watching!
Interesting thing that I encountered when trying to implement these settings today. If I select the 'Medium' preset, it defaults the "Anti aliasing" value to "Low". Then if I exit the game and restart, it hangs on a white screen. When I launch the game, the "Medium" present is still enabled, but the Anti Aliasing value is now on "High".
After further testing, any time I change the Anti-aliasing setting to anything other than 'High' the game I see the behaviour above. This is a fresh install as of today, following all of Cryobyte's recommendations. Anyone else seeing this?
EDIT: If it matters, I'm on 'Borderless Windowed', 1280x800, 'Auto-adjust' (forget what it's called) is set to 'Off'.
For anyone reading this, I'm also interested! I literally JUST uninstalled this and didn't notice, but I set my settings immediately after booting the game each time 🤔
Been playing this for about a month on my steamdeck, just LOVING it. I like 40hz/40fps cap with the settings at High. Thanks for the vids!
Glad that you're enjoying it as much as I am, and thank you for watching!
The issue with GPU fixed clock speed is the TDP is shared with the CPU and that lowers the CPU clocks which Elden Ring is not thread heavy but actually IPC heavy. I discovered that a few weeks ago.
Yeah, unfortunately I couldn't get CPU usage to go higher, even limiting the GPU to 400Mhz and pinning the CPU at 3500Mhz on 4 cores with SMT disabled.
Thank you for watching and contributing!
Dxvk async main benefit is that if you run that command, you can delete all shader cache and disable it whilst having smooth performance without any of your storage being used to store cache. I use it on every single game single player or multiplayer and have only had an issue with anti cheat In 1 single game, and that was insurgency lol. I recommend everyone use the command and disable pre caching, it saved me over 20gb of storage. Also it only works on proton ge
Good work though, very high quality content
Hey, I mentioned this in another comment, but I followed all those steps and used GE but completely forgot to mention it in the video. Even after making those changes, my frames were identical.
Thank you for watching!
Question. In your Recommended preset, you don't mention what TDP we should be using. Is it correct to assume that instead of manually setting the TDP, we just leave the Deck to handle it? What about Scaling? Do we keep the FSR from the previous settings you tackled, or do we revert it to Linear for the Recommended settings?
Sorry for being unclear, if the setting isn’t mentioned then it’s assumed to be at default, in this case automatic TDP and linear scanning 🙂
Thank you for watching, I’ll try to be more clear about that in the future!
@@cryobyte33 wow, I didn't expect a reply so soon! Thank you so much for the clarification!
@@thespianmask I reply to every comment I see, I’m here to help after all! 😄
How about doing Borderlands 3, I have tried running it w/ the VRAM fix and I think it actually degrades performance.
I can definitely add it to the list, thank you for the suggestion!
Hi, can you take a look at if there are any benefits and/or disadvantages between the default settings of 4core/8threads vs disabling hyperthreading in terms of power efficiency and performance. See if there's any content you can make into a video there. Thanks!
Hey, I actually did mention doing this in the section at 13:05. Disabling SMT (AMD Hyperthreading) and only using 2, 4 or 6 cores was part of my testing and had identical results with 4 and 6 cores. 2 cores had major frame drops. In addition, for Elden Ring in particular, I noticed no power draw differences over a 20 minute period.
Thank you for watching!
I told you tiny Programm with the best settings and fixes for games would be awesome, with presets to choose or a custom plugin woukd be awesome. Do you know custom plugins ? I use the for more vibrant colours or theming or to see protondb rating icon on every game preview picture.
You did tell me that, although I was using it prior to your comment 🙂
I've tested every plugin in their store. Fantastic and PowerTools are my favorites since they let me test more stuff!
Thank you for watching!
Aww, that's unfortunate.
We can only hope proton or from themselves offer some improvements in the future I suppose, maybe when dlc drops but seems somewhat unlikely.
Nice to see more videos by you, especially since I had a particular interest on this one, keep it up.
You clearly did your homework with this one.
Thanks for watching!
A few commenters mentioned the coop mod disabling anti-cheat, which I forgot about, so I'll be testing that soon. Stay tuned to see if I get more performance!
Yeah, I saw some of those. I'm curious if it'll help.
It'd be kind of ironic, since I have my own opinions about people circumventing from's multiplayer checks and balances.
Always figured this might be one of those things that they'd have to fix on their end, if at all.
@@Smuggers. Update: I just tested all 4 presets with the Co-Op mod, and tested with DXVK_ASYNC again just in case. Performance is still within margin of error, so this is 100% an engine limitation.
Great video, subscribed immediately
Thank you for watching, I'm glad that it helped! 😁
@@cryobyte33 tbh I bought the game once again for my pc and asked for a refund immediately after. The games is full of stutters even in the main menu which shows how poorly optimised it is.
I still haven’t received my deck (ordered two days ago and not shipped yet) and I will eventuality buy the game again for the deck. Sure I wait till the price drop significantly because I’m not going to pay 40-60€ for this unoptimised mess 😂
@@shattia Yeah, I have a 3080Ti and can barely manage a stable 60 with my ultrawide, it's horrible how badly the engine is optimized 😞
It's still an amazing game, but they REALLY need to finally figure out the issues, they're not the tiny "Armored Core" studio anymore.
I have everything set to high and then I just put Shadows to medium and grass to medium and it locked at 30 FPS with no dips ever, this is with your recommended settings for cryoutilities and the 4 gigs of vram. I've been enjoying it and honestly you don't really notice 30fps after you've been playing it for a few hours.
DXVK_ASYNC=1 is useful for non-steam games because it reduces if not eliminates the stutter caused by shader compilation, a step that isn't necessary on Steam games because Steam automatically downloads pre-compiled shaders for them.
This is a good point that I overlooked. I admit to only having a surface-level familiarity with DXVK_ASYNC, but I'm learning more every day.
Thank you for both teaching me something new, and for watching!
I came up with a crazy* idea: Use almost your recommend settings, but capping at 30 to have a nice balance between battery saving and visual fidelity.
That is: Medium preset, high textures, low anti-aliasing, depth of field and shadow quality left on medium preset's default and instead putting shader quality on low with 60Hz, allow tearing on, frame cap at 30 FPS and TDP Limit at 10. Obviously while using all off CryoUtilities' recommended settings ;-)
Will need more testing, but a first walk through Limgrave at Late night during rain killing randoms with torches was using between 13 and 15 Watts while having a flatlined frametime graph at 30.
Assuming an average power consumption of 15 Watts I can play this game with nice looking visuals for 2h 40min, which I personally think is spectacular :D
Definitely need a recommended settings video for Red Dead Redemption 2!
Thank you for watching and your vote is counted!
Great deep dive, but something you didn't mention that surprised me was that the default resolution of 1280x800 on the SD screen gets automatically letterboxed to 720 for some asinine reason. Doesn't that make the 800p setting a useless waste of extra power over 720p, since (according to what I've read) the game still renders at 800p but literally covers it up with the black bars?
Admittedly I haven't done any real benchmarking so I'm not certain of the difference
Heya, thanks for watching!
This was one of my earliest videos, so I was definitely still learning what to include, sorry for the omission. That said, you're correct, the game will render at full res and then fake letterbox. It actually does the same thing on my ultrawide monitor, and there are mods to remove the bars completely.
However, resolution scaling in Elden Ring is notoriously bad, and reducing the resolution down to absolute minimum, or even further with mods, doesn't actually grant better performance. It seems that the engine is almost entirely CPU dependent, and until a resolution of 1080p, there's no real difference in frame rates whatsoever.
I haven't gone back and done more thorough testing, so I don't have any numbers on hand, but I've played a decent amount and noticed no major differences between setting the resolution to 720p or 800p, although that's hardly a scientific test 😅
Regardless, thank you again for watching!
@@cryobyte33 That's very interesting. I suppose I'll leave it on the default 800p if it sucks either way lol. If only i could mod this game without giving up online too. The text size on the SD screen is a real killer for Elden Ring
@@ventiph4704 Yeah, I only use seamless coop online so modding doesn't affect me as much, but the fact that I don't have the option sucks.
Congratulations, you deserve it
Thank you so much!
Loving this channel. Are you able to do a video on Death Stranding Directors Cut? Would love to see some better perf on that game on the deck.
Thank you for watching!
This is the second request I got for Death Stranding, so I'll definitely be doing a video on it in the future 🙂
@@cryobyte33 Great to hear!
RDR2 deep dive please kind sir ! I’m struggling right now with the settings to get a locked 30fps with good enough fidelity, using my Nreal Air glasses. I tried to push to 1080p but it’s too demanding, with around 25fps on average. I pushed it back to 720p and use FSR with sharpness on 5 but now I get strange artifacts around my character when moving…
Thanks for watching!
Another vote for RDR2 added 👍 FSR adds that "halo" effect, very similar to DLSS 1.0. Hopefully I can shed some light on the performance 🙂
@@cryobyte33 Thank you, that would be so helpful.
So with the new OLED model has something changed?
Also i would love to know how it performs while docked to a 1080p monitor!
Have you figured the best setting for oled?
I just booted Elden Ring back up on my Deck after a while and I just noticed that it performs better than it used to (at least when CPU limited). In the exact same spot that I used to get 40-41fps, I'm now getting around 46fps, both tests on lowest settings and resolution.
I'm not sure what the cause is though, because inbetween there was the update to CryoUtilities 2.0, some SteamOS updates and the Elden Ring update today.
Just wanted to know if you can confirm a recent improvement in performance for Elden Ring.
I don't have it installed, and also didn't even know there was an update today 😅 It looks like "Several performance improvements and other bug fixes." is in the patch notes, but I've also heard that some people say CU2 works for it as well. AS such let's chalk it up to "both, probably" 😉
I just tried ER using CU and all your setting and idk why but I can barely hold 40FPS even at low settings. Especially on Altus Plateau the game even drops below 30 sometimes. I have 16GB swapfix and everything set as you recommended.
I really enjoy these videos.
Great job.
But damn all this effort when if you have a decent gaming PC already or an Xbox Series or PS5, which I understand everyone doesn’t, you can just do local game streaming on moonlight, remote play or PS remote play.
Can super sample at higher resolutions to the steam deck at 60 fps ultra settings and get 5-6 hours of battery life.
Downsides you can’t leave your house, not an issue for me because 99% of my steam deck time is couch play at home.
Keep making these videos though they’re super interesting.
Thank you for watching!
I don't mind the effort, and I think that the Deck has the potential to be the "one console" for many people in the future. I like remote streaming, but the latency can be finicky in some games, sometimes the console is being used by my wife, etc. Also yeah, you're limited to areas in your own house with decent wifi coverage 😅
Would you be willing to look into the Xbox Elite Series 2 firmware issues?
Apparently the deck used to recognize the ES2 as a unique device, then MS did a firmware update that makes it just show up as "Xbox Wireless Controller" now.
Is it possible to fix this on the Linux side, it's clear MS doesn't care to fix it.
It's important because it removed the paddles from being programmable on deck.
You can still use the paddles, if you program them through the Xbox or PC, but not directly through the deck options.
Curious on your opinion since you are an experienced Linux Developer.
I can definitely look into it, but based on what you describe it sounds like either Steam Input or the HID portion of the kernel needs an update, which Valve will need to implement.
That said, I do have an Elite Series 2, so I may try to get some time to look at it in the coming days and let you know if I find anything useful 🤞
@@cryobyte33 You're awesome.
Lots of chatter on reddit about getting the paddles to natively work.
Might be a popular video if you could find a fix.
To give you some insight into why I specifically want this;
Using my Series Elite 2 for PS5 games.
1) Remote play in with Chiaki
2) Use Series 2 as controller
3) Set a paddle to the lightbar button.
4) Still use primary TV as display, just leave the deck running to use the controller.
Been doing this on iphone, the only problem is you lose the lightbar button, which for some PS5 games *like GoW* you use it a lot.
So if I could program a different button to the PS lightbar on the Series 2, I could get native support on PS5 games. I can't use the Dual Sense it kills my hands.
But doing this on my iphone I get no noticeable input lag, just can't edit my controller buttons.
My backup plan is to just use a dual shock 4 instead this way on iPhone. That controller at least doesn't cause hand cramping and joint pain for me.
Nice vid 👍🏻
Thank you for watching!
Quick question, as I've not seen this question asked: did you try overclocking the cpu/gpu + the 4GB vram fix?
I don't have my steam deck yet, but on PC I've generally found that this game does get a consistency boost by deleting anticheat and playing it offline. Also I noticed it tends to hit single core limits on its cpu load. So I get the sense 40 is as much as a single core on the steam deck apu will allow for. It would also explain why maxing gpu would hinder performance bc it takes power away from single core performance.
I tried that and DX11 mode as well (I think I mention it in the pinned comment). Also, Elden Ring seemed to spread performance across cores pretty well, so that seems to be an inconsistency from normal PCs too 😅
@@cryobyte33 my pc is running on dx12 and it heavily favors one core even though theres a general usage spread, sometimes it even pegs that core to 100%. Killing anticheat and online functionality made a very noticeable difference on my laptop. There are a lot of weird quirks in this game that still seem to be a bit mysterious but I appreciate how in depth this guide went to offer some solid go to options. When I get my deck I'll definitely refer back to this video 👍
@@Orain88 Thank you for watching! I think I spent 15-20 hours trying different stuff 😅
@@cryobyte33 I'm finally playing on Deck, I see what you're saying about an even spread on the cpu cores. I find this veerrry interesting, this is not the way my laptop cpu works with Elden Ring, not at all. It heavily favors 1 core. I wonder why it behaves so differently on deck.
@@Orain88 Does your laptop run Linux? It could be Proton artificially distributing the load across cores when the engine itself doesn't 🤔
another great video.
Thank you for continuing to watch the content, I really appreciate it!
Can you get a cracked version of the game to see if it drm
I'll be trying with the coop mod, which also disables anticheat, in the next few days so I can see if that helps 🙂
I had huge group texture lost issue in Red Dead 2. Perhaps it is because I am playing it on Heroic game launcher for Epic Games
Thanks for watching!
I'm not sure, I haven't had any issues like that but I don't use Heroic 😅
@@cryobyte33 My Horizon 5 save is on Xbox Win and it cannot sync with steam ver. :(
@@GasperChen Yeah, that's a Microsoft problem unfortunately. They love vendor lock-in 😓
How did you get the MANGOHUD overlay to show the resolution and proton version? Sorry if this has been answered somewhere else!
Hey, thanks for watching! I use MangoHUD instead of mangoApp. Install it through the discover store, make a config file using their GitHub as a reference and then enable it with MANGOHUD=1 MANGOHUD_CONFIGFILE=/path/to/config %command% in the launch options for whichever game. That’s also how I gather the performance logs 🙂
@@cryobyte33 thank you for responding! Does this also work in Game Mode? Or only in desktop mode?
@@gusdiaz it works in both, and of course 😄
I am on BTRFS, the VRAM expansion works but the SWAP Fix does not work. I get an error :(
Thanks for watching!
There's a known issue for BTRFS in the repo right now, the issue is that when you use it, the swap file becomes a swap partition and a symlink. There's a proposed fix, but as I don't have a second deck to work with I haven't been able to test it yet.
I'll try to get it fixed in the coming week, but if you want to do it manually you can follow the steps in my Red Dead 2 video, which should theoretically work.
@@cryobyte33 Thank you for looking into this. I think this deleted my swap file on BTRFS and the methods in the guides don't do anything and I need to recreate my swap file. I just don't know how. Everything gives me errors :(
@@ZodiakSL Update, follow the steps in this comment to get back to "stock" BTRFS's swap file: github.com/CryoByte33/steam-deck-swap-resizer/issues/4#issuecomment-1288117054
Then, uninstall the swap resizer and install it again to get the later version, which has BTRFS support as of last night 🙂
@@cryobyte33 I saw that and the comment from popsUlfr from the original guide I followed for BTRFS. Sadly none of it worked.
I was happy with BTRFS before that point. It's just something I couldn't resolve without having someone there to talk to.
I went back to EXT4 for now but I haven't given up on BTRFS. It appears to be better than EXT4. I haven't given up on BTRFS and will go back to it once the swapfile thing can be resolved.
Wonder if there are any FPS improvements with it over EXT4 since everywhere I read that it has speed improvements aswell?
@@ZodiakSL It's definitely possible! I haven't been able to test yet because I only have a single Deck to test with, so one-way operations are a no-go at the moment.
It sucks that you had such an issue with it though, hopefully I can eventually make a guide and find the best way to fix these things.
I've put over 170 hours into Elden ring on the deck, and I set everything to highest settings at native resolution. It would lock me at 30 fps of course, and there were a few times it would dip into 15fps when there's a lot of enemies on screen. But just exploring the land between and running around, I wouldn't deem it unplayable. It stayed well above 25fps 90% of the time. I grew up with console games that did this all the time. PS3 games especially would often chug a long and dip to mid 20s, but as long as 90% of the time it's 25fps or higher I could still play the games just fine. I don't play any fast paced games though, so obviously a first person shooter would want more frames, but for most of my gaming 25+ fps is just fine. It's not the best: I would prefer 60...but once you get used to it your brain interpolates the missing frames.
I salute you, that would mess with my reaction time very badly 😅
Thank you for watching!
Just a quick note. There is no need to use dxvk-async with DirectX 12 games as dxvk doesn't handle api translation of d3d12. It is instead handled most commonly by vkd3d-proton. So the variable doesn't have an effect here.
Keep making steam deck videos tho! :D
Good point, thank you! FWIW I also tested it in conjunction with the DX11 mod, and it still had no effect.
Thank you for watching!
@@cryobyte33 rgr rgr.
Also note that it isn't a part of the official dxvk and so isn't included in regular Proton. You would need something like Proton-GE which includes it.
Tho when dxvk 2.0.0 arives it will have some new work that should help with shader compilation stutter in d3d9 - d3d11 games on systems that have new enough driver. Tho exact benefit varies from game to game.
Np. I will continue to try and check out your steam deck videos :)
@@xBlist84 I used GE when recording the video, but completely missed putting it in the script 😅 I haven't heard much about 2.0 yet, excited to see what it brings!
@@cryobyte33 ah gotcha :D 👍
FYI!!! Elden ring uses dx12 as it's graphics api meaning the deck is using VKD3D, *not* DXVK. DXVK-Async isn't working not because it doesn't help more, but because it isn't being loaded in the first place. If you want to try DXVK and what improvements it may entail, you'll have to force and patch the game to run using DX11 instead.
Yea, I learned about this later, I tested after the video release in DX11 mode and got identical results. Sorry about the confusion, and thank you for letting me know!
Does elden ring run at a mostly locked 40fps with this fix?
Yup! I’ve heard of a few small drops in late game areas but other than that it’s a very solid 40 🙂
Thanks for watching!
Hey and thanks for your great videos! I got Elden Ring the other day. Have set it up using your recommended settings for 40fps. As soon as i enter the open world in Limgrave the framerate drops to low/mid 30s. I am using your swapfix and VRAM at 4 GB. Do you have any idea what I could have missed?
Hmmm, with the swap fix and VRAM I was definitely getting rock solid frames, even in Caelid. Maybe the latest updates harmed performance? It's possible that they had to change the engine for the 6p co-op or something 🤔
You may have luck pinning the GPU if the issue is that it needs help, or pinning it lower if the CPU does.
I may look into revisiting this deep dive soon-ish if I get the time, I've learned a lot since filming and might be able to get even better performance, especially if they're making engine updates.
Regardless, I'm sorry that you're not getting a good framerate and I hope that it's temporary 😞
@CryoByte33 Thank you for an extremely quick reply! I'll tinker a bit more and hope for the best. Looking forward to the Witcher 3 video and hopefully a revisited Elden Ring one! 😀
Does it matter if the game is installed on the internal drive or an SD card?
@@e1m0h At the time of testing I didn't have an SD card, so I'm unsure. It's possible, especially when doing asset swaps while running quickly, but it's unlikely to affect performance while standing in 1 area.
@CryoByte33 Tried moving the game to the internal drive. No difference as far as I can tell. I will play the game at 30 fps which seems really solid if I use your 30 fps settings as a base and then lowers a couple of settings. Thanks again for all your hard work. (Ha en riktigt god jul!) 🎅
With Elden Ring still running on the "Dantelion" that Demon's Souls used in 2009, an engine limitation doesn't surprise me.
I don't know for sure but I know the steam deck has power limits of 15W, which could be a reason why you cannot get more frames as CPU and GPU together is taking all the power even the percentage is not 100% on either of them.
That's definitely true, but the CPU has a decent amount of headroom and the whole deck was only drawing 11.5 watts average. The issue had me pulling my hair out for a week 😂
Thank you for watching, and chipping in with ideas!
Wooooow, this is what I say "hard work" 🎉 Analysis, charts, drill-downs, calculation of bottleneck's. This is like "Avengers" from the world of system analysis! ❤
Thank you so much for watching and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I personally never lock frames. I just hate the resulting input lag. allowing tearing doesnt help either for me. I rather have unlocked fluctuating frames tbh.
Top notch content!
Congratulations and thanks for those deep dives videos, they really help a lot !
And I would love to see one on RDR2 first since I will probably be continuing my PC playthrough of that one on the deck soonish (maybe while installing some mods hehe)
Thanks for watching!
Your vote has been added to the tally, thank you! 😄
@@cryobyte33 you're welcome
And thanks 💜
Hello! I am looking to use your advice but I'm not entirely sure what a swap fix is or how to get it.
Hey, thanks for watching the video!
This deep dive was made before I had dedicated videos on it, but I do now. Check out my video "EASY & SAFE Health & Performance Boosts" where I give an explanation of all the tips I shared in this video, and more 🙂
@@cryobyte33 Thanks! Ill give those a watch
Hey, sorry I'm not a native speaker in English, but would you generally recommend setting the VRAM to 4GB and doing the swap fix ? Thank you Sir
In general, yes I would recommend that. See my video "Easy Performance Boosts for Steam Deck" for more info 🙂
Thank you for watching!
How do you get those 60C I am always on 70 depending on the TDP at max TDP I get like 83 C
This was recorded about 6 months ago, so more recent patches could have changed it, but I didn't do anything special for it! It also might have to do with ambient temperatures, since I keep my apartment between 17-18 Celsius.
Fantastic deep-dive, you got a new subscriber. Thx for your Swap/VRam suggestions. I have used them to improve BeamNG and it has been very impressive. I can run pretty much any scenario or map, I can even add traffic. Of course performance is a joke (17fps) but previously the Deck supports only very basic scenarios. I’d love a deep dive on BeamNG.
Thanks for the sub, the watch, and the recommendation! 😄
I do own BeamNG but I haven't booted it in years, I'll add it to the list of deep dives for sure.
Great, I know you will spot stuff I miss… BeamNG is seriously GPU and RAM bound. I was amazed how much difference your mods made. Of course finding a decent frame rate is very important (and elusive :-). Thanks again.
Hello, thank you for your work! I'd love to hear about RDR 2 because I saw a video on reddit of someone having fps issues when expanding VRAM to 4gb. It's interesting that the game works better when it's have a 1gb
Thanks for watching! I actually have a video on Red Dead 2 already, but it was made before the latest Deck update.
If you watch it, use the video "Easy Performance Boosts for the Steam Deck", also on my channel. It has an updated process for my swap fix, and might be able to get you the performance you're looking for before I can release a new video 🙂