We described Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC as a patch or two away from perfection and our opinion hasn’t changed! In our initial embargo day impressions piece, we also talked about how well the game runs on Steam Deck – and today we’re going to go a little deeper, pushing the Valve handheld to its limits in terms of matching the PS4 and PS5 versions – and why we ultimately ended up dropping back settings for a more optimal experience. Our final optimised settings for the Deck were also deployed on the new AyaNeo Air – a smaller, more compact PC handheld with an OLED display. It hasn’t got the raw horsepower of the Deck, but somehow it’s still capable of a perfectly reasonable Spider-Man experience.
First things first – we’ve got to tackle the hot potato that is the 30fps cap we recommend for Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered when played on Steam Deck. A little while ago, Valve released arbitrary refresh support for Steam Deck, allowing for games to run at anything between 40fps to 60fps. Even at the lower end of the range there, the 25ms per frame persistence is still a big upgrade over the 33.3ms of a 30fps experience. And it’s true: much of the game will play out at 40fps. However, fast traversal through the city – even at very low settings – causes stutter problems and so instead, we do recommend keeping the Deck’s display at 60Hz, with the system’s in-built 30fps cap in place.
After that, it’s all about those optimal settings. The truth is that at the flat high quality setting, you’re most of the way there in getting a high quality experience, with reductions to hair quality and weather particle detail to the medium setting keeping most of the game at 30fps. However, what’s fascinating about this game is that many of the settings see precision scale with resolution – and at a more pixel-constrained 720p, you can dial back settings with little impact on the overall experience. I’d recommend taking a look at the screenshot gallery on this page to see how Steam Deck on tweaked high and medium settings looks stacked up against PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. We’ve scaled all images to 1080p for consistency’s sake, but even so, the Deck’s presentation here is still compelling.
