Is The First Descendant Steam Deck compatible? It’s finally time to jump into Nexon’s new looter shooter on the Steam Deck, and despite not having an official rating yet, we’ve managed to get good performance out of Valve’s handheld.
Requiring just 50GB of storage, The First Descendant system requirements are quite reasonable across the board. The Steam Deck can handle running the game given that it’s one of the best PC handhelds on the market, but there’s still yet to be an official rating given.
Is The First Descendant Steam Deck compatible?
The First Descendant is not yet rated for Steam Deck by Valve. Based on our time testing the game post-launch, we expect the game to receive at least a rating of Playable.
Valve is sometimes a little slow in testing games and not every title has a Steam Deck rating at launch. The First Descendant is one such game, but this need not be cause for concern.
Best Steam Deck settings for The First Descendant
I’ve tested The First Descendant on the Steam Deck OLED and am happy to report that performance is great on the lowest settings with AMD FSR set to quality. Here are the graphical settings I used:
- VSync: On
- Visibility: Low
- Anti-Aliasing: Low
- Post Processing: Low
- Shadows: Low
- Global Illumination: Low
- Reflections: Low
- Textures: Low
- Effect: Low
- Vegetation: Low
- Shader Quality: Low
- Object: Low
- Physics: Medium
- Motion Blur: On
- Additional Options: AMD
- FSR: Quality
- Frame Generation: Off
- Ray Tracing: Off
The above settings resulted in a stable 54fps. However, this drops to around 35fps when in a public hub area and the general slowdown in performance is quite frustrating a times. Enabling Frame Generation will take the overall frame rate as high as 70fps, but stability is poor and it also introduces very noticeable stuttering throughout all gameplay.
GPU and CPU usage is almost always maxed out at the above settings while the game draws around 22.6w meaning you can expect around two hours of gameplay on an OLED model.
Even on the lowest settings, The First Descendant is perfectly fine visually and I would compare it to Warframe in terms of graphical quality and performance on the Deck.
If you’re running low on storage space, you can check out one of the best MicroSD cards for the Steam Deck to save you from having to delete games and make space the hard way.
Check out our list of the best Steam Deck games you can play right now and make the most of your portable powerhouse.
