Two of the most technically advanced current-gen titles have just launched on PC – Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and Remnant 2. These games push features like ray tracing, advanced upsampling, virtualised geometry and GPU-driven decompression, taxing even high-end PCs – and yet, both games also received Valve’s Steam Deck Verified seal of approval. Can the modest 15W APU that powers the Deck deliver a good experience in these cutting edge games, with good-looking visuals at reasonable frame-rates? Or do these latest PS5 ports push past the limits of Valve’s handheld?
Rift Apart in particular is one of the most cutting-edge current-gen titles, but the game is surprisingly scalable. We actually don’t need to cut back visual settings much at all, but upscaling is required to get into a comfortable performance window on the Deck. Here we have three options: AMD’s FSR 2, Insomniac’s temporal injection technique, or Intel’s XeSS, running in its reduced quality DP4A path with support for non-Intel GPUs.
Running all modes in their performance presets, I generally preferred the look of the XeSS image, which is sharp and relatively free of visual artefacts. FSR 2 suffered from more artefacting but maintained visual clarity, while temporal injection delivered a softer image with an artefacting level roughly between the other two options. On the surface, it seems like XeSS is the right choice – but FSR 2’s better performance eventually become the overriding factor. I used the performance preset to provide a stable set of resolution settings, though the dynamic resolution options do work very well if you want to try those instead.
