It is currently unclear whether Valve's handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck, would be capable of running Bethesda's upcoming flagship RPG, Starfield on launch day. After the question was raised in a recent interview with Bethesda Game Studios' director and executive producer, Todd Howard, he said that the game's Deck performance would be discussed "later down the road."
Although this wasn't an overly positive first official discussion about Starfield on the Deck, there may still be hope for those hoping to explore the galaxy on the go. While the Steam Deck isn't the most powerful gaming handheld on the market anymore, that position having been taken over by the Asus ROG Ally, Valve's efforts have been paying off so far, and there's reason to believe that this, too, is a surmountable task for it.
The fact that Starfield runs at 30 FPS on Xbox Series consoles paints a stark, albeit somewhat anticipated picture. Starfield seems to rely heavily on CPU performance due to its huge open world and key Bethesda features, like object permanence, and this could be a big problem for the Steam Deck. The Deck's CPU is arguably the device's weakest feature, as Valve assigned more importance to its GPU. While this has worked out for most games so far, Howard's comment suggests this may not be the case with Starfield. Yet, the fact that he didn't immediately dismiss the Deck could also be very important.
As Starfield is "five or six" games in one, in some respects, it's not hard to imagine that it may well end up being untenable to run the game at playable frame rates on the Deck. Howard's comments could certainly be taken either way, but it's entirely possible that Bethesda may simply wish to dedicate more time to Deck support later on, possibly even after the game first comes out on mainline platforms.
It may be worth pointing out that Todd Howard plays Starfield on Xbox Series S, which is the weakest gaming device of the generation. Putting the Series S next to the Deck isn't necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison, but it does suggest that the game is at least somewhat scalable in most respects. In the end, it will boil down to CPU performance, but it's definitely possible that the Deck will be able to pull its weight.
One thing that's for sure is that Starfield is incredibly important to Xbox, and this may well lead to the company investing heavily into optimizing the game for virtually any modern gaming system, as was the case with Skyrim. This would likely end up including the Steam Deck too, but even if there's no official support available on that front, the game's modding scene is bound to figure out a solution in due time.
Starfield launches on September 6 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: PC Gamer
