A last-minute SteamOS update has saved Doom: The Dark Ages on Steam Deck, and it runs surprisingly okay-ish

I couldn’t offer many Steam Deck-specific insights in my look at Doom: The Dark Ages’ PC performance last week, because a crashing issue was inconsiderately – dare I say, rudely – blocking me from even reaching the main menu. Over the weekend, however, a purpose-built SteamOS Preview update stepped in, making the brawly sci-fantasy shooter playable on the handheld. Just in time for its launch on the 15th, no less.

I’ll confess that as I set about parrying imps between my plastic-calloused fingers, the "playable" part was still dropping minor bombshells. My main complaint with how The Dark Ages runs on desktops is the mandatory ray tracing effects that have, compared to the hardly much uglier Doom Eternal, slowed it right down. The Steam Deck can run many things, but it usually reacts to traced rays by curling up and sobbing until they go away. Still, maybe I should have had more faith in the series that essentially brought functional RT effects to the Deck in the first place, as this most recent, most demanding instalment can still run around a playable 30fps. Without resorting to its lowest settings, too.

Just to double-clarify, to get The Dark Ages working on the Steam Deck does – at the time of writing, T-minus three days before launch – require you to go into the system settings and switch to SteamOS’s Preview branch, updating specifically to the 3.7.6 version. Presumably the same crash fix will make its way to the Stable and Beta branches as well, though for what it’s worth, the closest thing to instability I’ve endured on the Preview branch has been a couple of brief mid-game stutters.

Otherwise, it’s... fine? It launches fine with the fix, 1280x800 is supported fine, the default controls all feel fine, small text reads fine, cloud saves sync fine. Performance is, as on desktop, sharply down from the days of Eternal, but it’s functional with an assist from FSR upscaling. On the Low preset with upscaling on Performance, framerates vary from a Mancubus' bumhair below 30fps up to 40fps in the tighter corridor bits. And you can replicate that performance while sticking some settings on Medium or High quality – more on that below.

It does burn through battery life, only narrowly avoiding an all-time RPS benchmark low by draining my original LCD-screen model from full to flat in 1h 20m. Still, as disappointing The Dark Ages’ overall slowing-down can be on a big, fat, desktop, we can probably cut it some slack on the Deck. Need for a SteamOS save aside, it really doesn’t have any business running on this kind of hardware at all, let alone with a mostly stable 30fps within reach; The Steam Deck’s APU and shared RAM/VRAM fly so far under the minimum system requirements that they’re faceplanting the runway. Yet, here we are. By modern standards, it’s not even that heavy a weight on the Steam Deck’s SSDs, with a final install size of 69GB (despite asking for 100GB in the requirements).

Fingers crossed that crucial SteamOS Preview update makes it to the main branch asap. Then, we could maybe even see The Dark Ages surpass Eternal’s Valve-granted Playable status by earning a Steam Deck Verified badge, and that did not seem like an imminent possibility last week.

Doom: The Dark Ages Steam Deck settings guide

While most modern graphics cards can leave a bunch of The Dark Ages’ settings on their highest, Ultra Nightmare, without serious repercussions, the Steam Deck’s pluckiness doesn’t extend quite so far. That said, I’ve found that most of them don’t actually need to stoop to Low, with nicer (or, as this is Doom, more enthusiastically horrible) Medium and High options able to take effect without noticeably hobbling that aforementioned 30-40fps range.

Here’s the full list of what I’ve been playing on; everything else can be left on the defaults.

• Aspect ratio: 16:10
• Resolution: 1280x800
• Present from Compute: On
• Resolution scaling mode: Off
• Chromatic aberration: Off
• Depth of Field: On
• Upscaler: FSR
• FSR: Performance
• FSR Frame generation: Off
• Motion blur: Off
• Texture pool size: 2048
• Shadow quality: Low
• Reflections quality: Low
• Lights quality: Low
• Particles quality: High
• Decal quality: High
• Water quality: Medium
• Volumetrics quality: Low
• Texture filtering quality: Medium
• Geometric quality: Low
• Shading quality: Medium
• Directional occlusion: Medium

It remains a shame that there’s no ray-tracingless Ultra Mega Low settings to get back up towards the 60fps mark where nu-Doom games have so comfortably lived before. But still, if enforced RT games are here to stay – and judging by this, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, they likely are – then at least it’s not a given that the Steam Deck is getting left behind.

Just don’t be tempted to flick on FSR frame generation as a means of punching through that FPS ceiling. The Dark Ages looks truly gruesome with its algorithm-generated frames attempting to impersonate the real ones, with loads of lag and outright broken anti-aliasing that fuzzes up edges to unplayable degrees. Stick to the old fashioned settings, insofar as regular FSR upscaling can be considered old fashioned.