Trying and testing the SteamOS duo
Trying and testing the SteamOS duo
Greetings, owners of hardware who are also partial to reasonably well-made pirate game remakes. I’m trying something new and fresh and debatably sexy for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, extending the semi-usual Steam Deck performance and settings investigation with one for the newly launched Steam Machine as well. Look, I said debatably.
Valve have already bestowed Steam Deck Verified status on Black Flag Remastered, so it shouldn’t be too shocking to hear that yes, both the Deck and Machine can run it without collapsing like cheaply erected mainsails. Which is a good start, though my testing (which includes the day 1 patch) has unearthed some surprises: the Steam Machine, for one, punches a little above its weight, pulling similar average framerates to a higher-specced RTX 4060 desktop.
On the Steam Deck, you also get access to the full selection of graphics options, a welcome reversal of how Assassin’s Creed Shadows locked itself into a Deck-specific quality preset. Or, at least, you do with the Ubisoft Connect version – I didn’t have pre-release access to the Steam build, and haven’t yet heard back from Ubisoft on whether Steam copies also get the full options menu. I’ll update here, either with a response or after I’ve checked out the Steam version post-launch.
Hopefully it does, as a fully custom approach can produce similar performance – think 30-45fps – as the lowest handheld preset, without every single individual setting actually needing to hit rock bottom. And again, the Steam Machine is plenty peppy for 1080p, even being able to pretty up Black Flag Resynced’s glittering seas with a layer of optional ray tracing.
Since, let’s be honest, more of you will have one, let’s start with the Steam Deck. While that Verified badge will have been granted to the game’s Steam version specifically, it is possible - as you’ll have inferred from a paragraph and a half ago - to get the Ubisoft Connect edition up and running too. Normally I’d recommend Lutris for the job of installing a non-Steam launcher, but a recent-ish update to Ubisoft’s app has borked the Lutris setup process somewhat, so for now you should try installing Connect directly. This isn’t too tricky: just head into Desktop Mode, download the Ubisoft Connect installer, launch it through Steam as a non-Steam game, then do the same with the main Connect .exe itself. The launcher can be a bit finicky with the Deck’s gamepad-style controls, but as long as you fire up Black Flag Resynced with a press of the A button, the game will know to use the appropriate inputs.
If you are a preset stickler, the trio of specifically handheld-tuned High, Medium, and Low variants may be impressive. However, at native resolution, these seem more geared towards newer, relatively powerful portables like the ROG Xbox Ally X. Even on the Deck’s 800p screen, then, some upscaling help is required – the Handheld Low preset averaged 28fps in Resynced’s benchmark tool with native TAA, but a much more palatable 35fps with FSR on Quality mode. And since this particular benchmark is a tad easygoing, compared to how demanding some parts of the actual game can get, you’re not gonna want to drop below that level.
The good news is that we can crank up a few of Handheld Low’s constituent settings, without kicking performance in its malnourished shins. Granted, this is trickier than in a lot of modern games, because unlike a lot of modern games, almost all of Resynced’s individual settings genuinely do impact framerates to some degree. No cheeky Ultra Highs here then, unfortunately, but options like screen space effects and terrain quality do at least keep their performance taxes comparatively light, so they can go on garden-variety Low rather than Very or Ultra Low. Here’s what I settled on:
True, that’s still a lot of Very/Ultra Lows, but the real load-bearer here is FSR Balanced. The upscaler’s Quality mode does look noticeably sharper, and in the benchmark tool, its 34fps average with these custom settings was only 4fps slower than with Balanced – not exactly the kind of gap you could sail a galleon through. Playing normally, however, revealed Balanced to be much, much more effective at maintaining a 30fps floor when scrambling around busy areas like Havana, a knot of marketplaces and angry Spaniards that would repeatedly send Quality-boosted framerates back down into the twenties. Extra fuzziness or not, that makes Balanced the way to go, especially as in calmer sections, it helps these settings push Resynced as high as 45fps.
As for general Deck-preparedness, there’s not a huge amount to moan about. Maybe some of the input prompts in the tutorial were a bit small? But I haven’t found anything tricky to read on the small screen elsewhere. Ubisoft Connect’s cloud save feature appears to work fine too, despite its crowbarring into SteamOS compatibility.
My only real complaint is battery drain, Resynced slurping dry a full charge of my original LCD Deck in just 1h 19m (three minutes faster than Shadows, incidentally). You should be able to get a couple of hours out of the more efficient Steam Deck OLED, but that does put Captain Kenway’s Knifey Adventure in the lowest echelon of handheld electricity hogs.
The Steam Machine’s pace was never going to be its best feature, even if it neglected to let you stick seaweed on it. Nonetheless, Black Flag Resynced seems decently performant on Valve’s pricey cube. At 1080p (with native TAA), it produced preset averages ranging from 43fps on Ultra High to 82fps at Ultra Low, with the middling High scoring 57fps.
I’ve also been testing Resynced on the RPS Test Rig, with an RTX 4060 graphics card, and the results have been remarkably similar: 46fps on Ultra High, an identical 57fps on High, and 84fps on Ultra Low. What makes this impressive on the SteamOS device’s part is that the RTX 4060 is usually slightly faster than the RTX 5050, the GPU I used as a sparring partner in my Steam Machine review – and which almost routinely beat it. Assuming the Machine hasn’t magically gained some horsepower when I wasn’t looking, that means Resynced is unusually well-tuned to run on its compact, laptop-style GPU.
In fact, the custom settings I’m going to suggest here are almost identical to what I’d recommend for a conventional mid-range graphics card like the RTX 4060. It’s mostly a blend of High and Medium options, with a few lower-impact luxuries (including maxed-out texture resolution).
All that translates into a 70fps average in the benchmark tool, with a generous cushion against sub-60fps drops in the game proper. As with the Steam Deck, we’re relying on FSR upscaling for a chunk of those frames, but FSR’s image quality has sufficiently improved over the years that it’s now viable to deploy at 1080p. Just don't set FSR to its Native AA mode, as in a rare technical fumble by Resynced's standards, it's a fair few frames slower than native-rez TAA.
If you’re not hugely fussed about securing a solid sixty, the Steam Machine can handle lower-end ray tracing as well. I’d go for a combination of Resynced'S 'Extended' RT setting, which broadens the range of effects, with Medium toggles for both the Ray Tracing Quality and the BVH Quality sub-settings. This drops the benchmark average from 70fps to 59fps, and you’ll often flick around the mid-fifties in cities or foliage-heavy areas, but considering some games’ traced ray effects will delete a third of your framerate or more, I don’t think that’s too egregious a drop.
There is one last setting you may or may not to change, as my Steam Machine naughtily defaulted to a 60Hz (i.e. 60fps) display limit – a limit that needed manual disabling via the SteamOS’s quick access menu. As with the extent of available settings menu, I don’t know if this is specific to the Ubisoft Connect version I was using, or will pop up when playing Valve’s preferred Steam edition, but consider yourselves warned. Unless your TV/monitor caps at 60Hz anyway, in which case, who gives a parrot feather.
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