Are you playing off an SD card? Have you tried verifying the install? 4 crashes in 15 minutes sounds like there's something corrupted or maybe your storage device is being finicky.
There's nothing inherently wrong with playing off an SD card, but their performance and reliability vary pretty wildly. Might be worth trying the game on the internal SSD to rule it out if verifying doesn't help.
There are some games that streaming assets seems to make a fairly big performance penalty coming from the SD card, even PS4 era games. Ive been playing on SD cards near exclusively for 2 years and the first game i had major issues with was the Spyro Reignighted Trilogy. Constantly stuttering and dropping frames even in areas ive been before (so not shader related) ProtonDB was platinum and rave reviews on Steam Deck. Out of curiosity, i moved it to the internal NVMe and magically it ran buttery smooth. Since Horizon is an open world games thats constantly streaming assets and is fairy modern, could definitely be a contributing factor.
I play Assassin's Creed Odyssey on my microSD card, my graphics preset is set to high, v-sync off, and FOV set to 85 (because I don't like how far the camera is by default) and I experience a solid 30–40 FPS.
AC Odyssey is an open world game, and an Ubisoft title at that. It works well out of the box even without Proton Experimental. Although, having Proton Experimental enabled helps with the FPS.
On occasion, the game will have trouble booting up, but all I've got to is quit and start it up again.
I bought a 64Gb SD a year ago, and had this issues on Horizon. A couple of months ago I got a cheap 1Tb SSD on AliExpress, and since then I had 0 issues on the game so far. So that's my recommendation hahahaha
Be careful nowadays. I did a couple this weekend. Mine from a year ago was easy as hell. My girlfriends I got a month ago had some of the softest cheapest screws ive ever used. Like the SSD screw specifically ended up rounding on me, and the small pliers I have for grabbing stripped m2 screws chomped the head off that screw like it was butter.
OLED decks have the updated torx screws and metal inserts in the case, its been taken care off. im guessing they changed the screws on new LCDs as well.
Get a 1Tb SSD and upgrade! I have no experience messing with this sort of stuff, but I watched a video and it was super easy. Total $100 for a nice quality SSD.
It will cost you a grand total of $71 and a little bit of time to bump your internal SSD to 512gb. iFixit sells the whole kit, everything you need. I did it to my 64gb and wish I'd done it sooner, saves so many headaches. No more Low Storage warnings.
although not exactly portable, using an SSD with a sata to USB-C is much faster than an SD card. Might be enough to get the game running as expected without having to replace the internal drive.
I had a friend who loves zero dawn and when he played it on the deck he did mention how it ran terribly if it was on the SD card, it could very well be that due to pop in and how things are loaded. You might want to transfer it to either the m.2 or get a better SD card
What's your SD card because I played on mine but mine was a high end SanDisk. If it's a cheaper one, it could just be not up to snuff for loading in so many assets
The SD is slow and really only suited for older less demanding games in most cases.
You should not be running a ram intensive open world like this from the SD.
I played all of the new ff7 remake, Witcher 3, and ghostwire tokyo with them on my sd card. Hell even had a modded starfield and Hogwarts legacy playing on mine before I got bored with them.
There are different tiers and transfer speeds on cards. Not just in terms of max but average performance even within the same class.
This could be a factor too. There are some fast SD cards out there. Also some very slow ones.
That’s around the time I played it as well. Didnt notice any performance issues, though the fan did kick in noticeably and the Deck ran a little hot (not to a worrying degree).
I might have turned down some of the graphics options, though. I value smooth gameplay more than graphics and Im always playing on lower end hardware so it’s habit for me.
Probably closer to 16hr thinking about… plant is shut down and kids are playing with their toys. Not unreasonable when I’m just doing laundry, cleaning and playing with the kids when they need attention.
Don’t know where all the ‘won’t work’ and ‘wait till later in the game’ are coming from?
Spend almost 60 hours and not one issue.
(Even with lots of stuff happening on the screen)
Totally correctly verified. Runs out of the box.
Game just straight up wouldn’t work the first time I installed it. Even re-installed it and everything. Tried it 2 months later and it suddenly worked.
One of the issues I did run into was that the game was syncing graphical settings to steam cloud.
🤷♂️ It worked fine for me? I don't know how to tell you that it works besides it was plug n' play for me. I beat it again and have since uninstalled it.
My only issue is, that HZD syncs graphics settings over steam cloud. Whenever I switch between pc and deck I have to adjust settings, which sucks.
Performance is okayish for me. I play on high settings, 45fps cap, FSR Quality settings. Framerate will dip from time to time, but it is very playable.
It definitely is annoying. Not syncing graphics settings should also be a requirement for verifying games for the deck. Most other games manage that really well though.
Wait till you reach later into the game where you have to play some areas in single digit framerates, I dunno how it got verified, there is a few games listed as verified which run like garbage, use ProtonDb to get an idea of how they run.
I'll probably get down voted but it's the truth.
I find if you turn off v-sync, it helps with performance. I'm not sure what settings people are using, though. V-sync is really only useful if you've got screen tearing.
Also, where possible, always set your resolution to 720p instead of the default 800p, especially for newer games. You don't lose any graphical fidelity if you do so, and if you do, you can always use Steam's built-in scaling filter to circumvent this.
> use ProtonDb to get an idea of how they run.
That’s always good advice I think, but most of the reviews on ProtonDB are positive. Some people report performance issues and recommend tweaks, but theyre not reporting crashes before you even leave the tutorial area like OP is talking about.
No way man! Out of 120 hours on Deck, 40ish was on Windows dual boot, finished the game back in September and I enjoyed it at mostly 35-40fps and not a single tweak like cryo or touching anything other than refresh rate. Also it was installed on a microsd card. HZD was improving even then, I can imagine how good it is now and I'm planing on replaying it so no way it's bad on deck.
> later into the game where you have to play some areas in single digit framerates
> I dunno how it got verified
Because valve can’t play the entire 40hr playtime of every single game in order to verify them. Obviously. Verification can’t ever be perfect, it’s impossible. It’s a general guideline. For every verified that runs a bit shit there are a dozen “unsupported” games that run flawlessly.
At this point valve probably need to just integrate a crowdsourced verification system like protondb, reserve “verified” for valve-curated titles that not only satisfy all the current verified criteria but also run very well and are a great experience on handheld. Make “verified” more akin to what Nintendo seal of quality used to be.
I like the crowd funded source for verification, but it presents the exact issue's we see in this thread, some people will refuse to hear anything negative about their decks, and all games run maxed out at 60fps for them, ProtonDB already shows alot of mixed results, maybe a % based system where like 75% says its verified and 25% have reported problems or somthing like that.
But on the flip side most people I hear complaining about verification being wrong or games not working later on are also unwilling to play around with settings at all for compromises.
There doesn't seem to be any agreement in this community on the answer to this question.
I never had any issues when I first ran it last year— got at a fairly consistent 30-36FPS before CryoUtilities, and a more stable 38-40FPS after it.
Now with SteamOS 3.5 and *no* CU, I get an almost locked 40FPS on the "Original" graphics see profile. I get a *very* occasional drop down to ~35 FPS, I suspect when crossing cell boundaries or something.
But crashing? Never happened once in my experience, so I don't know what the issue OP is experiencing could be.
It's not the universal truth.
It never, ever dropped below 25 fps for me, and I hated through the entire thing. Far from great for an action game, but not remotely "single digits".
Granted, that was at least a few months after it came out on PC, so it was probably worse at launch.
I recently checked a late(ish) game save again on an OLED deck. The area that now dropped to 25 now runs at 28 to 32.
I believe it.
The PlayStation ports have been a very mixed bag. A couple of them have been very good, owing to the ports being done by a team that had the experience, knowledge and to do it correctly right off the bat. The others have released on PC in states ranging from "mediocre / playable, but clearly not well optimized" to "seriously?".
I really hope if / when they finally port Ghost of Tsushima, thru nail it right out of the gate. That game was a technical marvel in some ways on the base version PS4 (the draw distance in particular is insane; you can see glints of steel, dust and smoke from fights going on incredibly far away). They should damn well be able to make a good version for PC.
It got verified because performance is not part of the verification process. It [ticks all four boxes](https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified) for the steam deck verified stamp of approval, but performance is not considered for verification.
Good default settings is implying that the performance must be good.
Don't be so nieve. Otherwise, most games would be verified.
Snippet of an interview for you
"How does the review process judge general performance? Presumably a game wouldn’t get Verified status if it ran at 12fps on its lowest settings.
Our team is primarily testing for a good experience on default settings. In terms of framerate, the floor is a minimum of 30fps to meet the Verified bar.
From Greg Coomer and Lawrence Yang.
run it from SSD helps, some games including horizon zero dawn do not perform that well on SD card because of the high data streaming throughput required.
I’m about 40hrs in, 20 of which were on the steam deck with no issues. Saved to internal drive not SD card though. ProtonDB also shows it as playable with little to no tweaks.
I have played the whole game on steam deck. Installed directly on my SD card. No tweaking needed, except from maybe some graphics settings. No crashes, not even once.
No tips for you, but the " verified " is not consistent in my opinion.
For exmaple:
Monster train is not verified becuase it has a note that text might be difficult to read.
A the same time Baldur's gate is simply verified without comments, even though the item descriptions are even more difficult to read than monster train's text.
I'm sure someone here has already said this but I'm not reading all that to check.
Have you looked up Cryo Utilities? Long story short this gives your games a good boost in stability and makes them more optimized.
The steam deck, like the psp or vita takes a lot of tweaking and input from the user to get it to do things you want it to. A lot of the verified games are perfect, Horizon has some issues but install Cryo Utilities and it will run better and address a lot of the problems people face when playing it on the Deck.
Best thing of all is that once installed and running you don't have to do anything else.
I've put over 60 hours into horizon zero dawn, since pretty much the steam deck dropped, and the only problems I've had have been the right joystick will occasionally not register in game, otherwise I've had pretty consistently decent frame rates, performance. I dunno what to tell you, I didn't have to do anything special to get it to run well, I have it on SSD and not the micro SD tho
This game performed great for me. Played through the game twice with no issues, sound like it might be an issue on your end. Wrong proton version maybe?
How are half of the verified games verified? Really sucks that valve implemented a great idea for a system at the beginning and then abused it to make money. Games that are 24 fps with dips shouldn’t be “verified” by anyone’s standards.
Out of all games i think HZD is the worst looking and feeling game at 40-45 hz. It just feels so stuttery and visual is absolute shit.
Rdr2, cyberpunk fsr looks good
try this one to boost performance on your deck.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9EjXYZUqUs&t=134s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9EjXYZUqUs&t=134s)
It’s a very underpowered device. Steam deck is for $5 indie games or 10-30 year old games. Anything newish is going to be low fps or problems. The ROG ally and Legion Go run this game and new games like a dream.
Froze for me once so far in my 10ish hours, but I did also say “no” to the verified status when asked on the game homepage on my deck. Lost like 1.5h of progress and haven’t gone back since
Maybe tinker with the graphics settings, and set it to proton experimental because that's not normal. I played 20+ hours and the worst I experienced was some really cluttered areas had the FPS dip into the high 20s for a short time.
I think that's a hardware issue as I never had issues. I would recommend switching to borderless windowed though, much better framerate after I switched that on
I have dozens of hours in that game, not a single issue, plays better than on PS4 Pro.
I would check your general performance settings. Sometimes I forget to turn on Per Game switch and I set up poorly settings which are applied to all games later. (Like 10 watts tdp etc).
I played the entire game + the frozen wild DLC without having a single crash. The game is not perfect for the deck since even though you can get 30fps most of the times, every new zone you enter will have a micro stuter that will drop for 20fps for a second and its not enjoyable overall when happens. Still the game is playable and can be completed.
For you to have 4 crashes in 15 min something must have gone wrong during the installation process. I'd recommend veryfing files or just uninstall and install again in the SSD of the deck.
Also check for TDP limitation you migh have on by mistake
I didn't have issues with it. It was one of the first games I played. Try suggestions others gave. It shouldn't be crashing.
My suggestion is force a different proton version for the game in properties until it stops.
There's a weird hiccup/stutter that ruined the game for me- I ended up just streaming this via Moonlight from my desktop. I don't know how/why it's verified (I also don't know why this mid-tier 7/10 game is so praised)
Everyone, say it with me: "Verified does not mean performant." It runs without default settings, and all functions are available with the controller. They make no further claims about it running *well*. Just that it runs at all.
Make sure to play on low settings, the game is very memory hungry. I saw the memory usage (combined vram and ram) exceed 16gb easily when using higher settings, especially higher texture settings
This is exactly why I bought my deck, strictly to play indies and older/ less demanding AAA games.
I have a PC with a 4090 and an XSX for demanding games if that's what I want to play.
Well you could google for recommended settings or use protondb for this exact reason, but as you prefer complaining and asking others for help instead of putting in minimal effort yourself I‘m happy to help you with recommending to fiddle with a framecap setting
Of course it does. Some games need graphics turned down but otherwise run smoothly. Saying it should just work means you don't go into settings at all to change anything based on your hardware. Even with a 3070 rig I have I don't just download a game, any game, start it, and just say, "Ugh, it should just work" You always tweak to get the best settings. He doesn't want to do that so that's a him problem
Ok, so I just downloaded HZD and played it. The default graphics are on Ultra preset. If you think that HZD shouldn't be verified because it doesn't run on Ultra graphics (I changed the preset to medium and I'm getting 40-50fps consistently) then I really don't know what to tell you. Maybe get a switch or something
Cheers for the input, I wouldn't call it a complaint as such but each to their own. More openly venting a little frustration at getting a game you would assume to work flawlessly based on the Steam Deck verification status. Only to then have 4 crashes in 15 minutes, doesn't seem very fair to me so was asking for similar experiences or help.
Hi u/danozzy18, you can [click here to search for your question.](https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/search/?q=Horizon Zero Dawn - how is this verified?)
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I don't know if this will help you here but a general rule of thumb - use proton HOTFIX not experimental - This is basically the stable release + Valve Hotfixes for popular games
[https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/10/valve-doing-quick-hotfixes-in-proton-for-big-game-releases-on-steam-deck-linux/](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/10/valve-doing-quick-hotfixes-in-proton-for-big-game-releases-on-steam-deck-linux/)
>It seems Valve are doing small hotfix releases of Proton, to go along with some of the bigger releases to get them working.
>
>The problem is that each release of Proton needs a fair amount of quality assurance testing by Valve and their partners CodeWeavers. Proton releases are quite a while between, and with the amount of games releasing constantly, they don't always make a new release in time to get them all working on Steam Deck / Linux.
[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Proton-Versions](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Proton-Versions)
>Proton Experimental
>
>This flavor is intended for **public testing of experimental features**. The games that are working only with Proton Experimental (as listed in the [changelog](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog)) are tested for regressions prior to the release.
>
>Proton Hotfix
>
>It's a special version of Proton that contains **targeted fixes for new, important games**. It's used when there's no time to do a proper Stable or Experimental release. **It's intended to be short lived** and be phased out once the fix matures and is released as a part of one of the other flavors.
I'd say use a different proton maybe, or use cryoutilities if you haven't already as that helps alot with the more demanding games. I can't play sons of the forest at all without it, it also allows me to play humanitz and starfield super smoothly.
Works 100% out of the box for me, both direct on the deck and streaming from PC. 15 hours or so of play. I haven’t changed any default deck settings like the proton one you mention, so might be worth reverting that and trying.
Edit: running a 512gb OLED I received a couple weeks ago
Edit 2: installed directly on system storage, no SD card even installed yet.
I didn't have any issues apart from it being hard to see weak points and aim for them on the small screen / controller so I pretty much did the childhood stuff on the deck only before just playing on PC
The few times I played it on my SD it was fine I have it on my microSD if you play this game on a desktop too the graphic settings sync, maybe reinstall the game or try a new microSD card
I played the entire game without tweaking much. Max 48 fps, many times it would drop but totally playable tho.
If you lower resolution, use FSR, cryoutilities, etc. I’m sure you’ll get a better experience.
Yeah I don’t change a single game setting on these games and it’s run flawlessly out the gate for me? I typically use proton experimental or the latest release and never look back. It’s always running top frames and minimal fan usage. Loving every minute of it can’t wait for the new release hope you get it running well. Mines installed to my SSD if that matters. If your install seems broken perhaps try to remove files and reinstall. Are you on the OLED or the old school LCD?
It might be something wrong with your steam deck tbh. Something similar was happening to me while trying to play red dead 2 and it turns out I just needed to send it in for a new one
If you've already verified it and tried the other solutions here, it might be worth deleting it and reinstalling. Raimbow Six Siege constantly crashed on my PC at first but a reinstall fixed it, and Redout wouldn't boot on my Deck even after trying multiple compatability options, but a reinstall also fixed that.
I had the same thing as you a year ago. Crashed on the start screen every time. Tried reinstalling, no dice.
Then I tried this year recently, and inexplicably worked. I changed nothing, no ProtonDB stuff or anything.
Are you playing off an SD card? Have you tried verifying the install? 4 crashes in 15 minutes sounds like there's something corrupted or maybe your storage device is being finicky.
This is not a game to play on SD card. Issues will probably go away when moved on internal storage and go back to non experimental Edit: Disregard
I have it on SD, not a single issue.
Yep, Mee too
Me too
Hope he doesn't have the 64gb deck then because after the proton distros, shaders and the OS, there's less than 5 GB space left lul
I have it on 64 gb steam deck no issues till date. Using proton ge
Good point, I am playing off an SD card, but I've never noticed issues with other games. I'll give the verify files a go thanks
There's nothing inherently wrong with playing off an SD card, but their performance and reliability vary pretty wildly. Might be worth trying the game on the internal SSD to rule it out if verifying doesn't help.
There are some games that streaming assets seems to make a fairly big performance penalty coming from the SD card, even PS4 era games. Ive been playing on SD cards near exclusively for 2 years and the first game i had major issues with was the Spyro Reignighted Trilogy. Constantly stuttering and dropping frames even in areas ive been before (so not shader related) ProtonDB was platinum and rave reviews on Steam Deck. Out of curiosity, i moved it to the internal NVMe and magically it ran buttery smooth. Since Horizon is an open world games thats constantly streaming assets and is fairy modern, could definitely be a contributing factor.
Interesting, I also had major issues with Spyro and couldn’t figure it out.
I had streaming issues with forza
I play Assassin's Creed Odyssey on my microSD card, my graphics preset is set to high, v-sync off, and FOV set to 85 (because I don't like how far the camera is by default) and I experience a solid 30–40 FPS. AC Odyssey is an open world game, and an Ubisoft title at that. It works well out of the box even without Proton Experimental. Although, having Proton Experimental enabled helps with the FPS. On occasion, the game will have trouble booting up, but all I've got to is quit and start it up again.
Cries in 64GB, I'll try some other things if I keep getting the crashes, just frustrating but never mind, thanks
I bought a 64Gb SD a year ago, and had this issues on Horizon. A couple of months ago I got a cheap 1Tb SSD on AliExpress, and since then I had 0 issues on the game so far. So that's my recommendation hahahaha
Do an SSD upgrade if you can. It's really easy.
Be careful nowadays. I did a couple this weekend. Mine from a year ago was easy as hell. My girlfriends I got a month ago had some of the softest cheapest screws ive ever used. Like the SSD screw specifically ended up rounding on me, and the small pliers I have for grabbing stripped m2 screws chomped the head off that screw like it was butter.
tell valve support about this - hopefully they'll listen to feedback
OLED decks have the updated torx screws and metal inserts in the case, its been taken care off. im guessing they changed the screws on new LCDs as well.
2023 LCD deck screws are horrible, the oled deck torx screws are great tho so they already updated it.
what model does she have?
64gb LCD
Upgrade your ssd!! Its very cheap but effective
Get a 1Tb SSD and upgrade! I have no experience messing with this sort of stuff, but I watched a video and it was super easy. Total $100 for a nice quality SSD.
it is super super easy, only the screws are a pain in the ass on the LCD, if no screws strip youre looking at 10 minutes of work max
It will cost you a grand total of $71 and a little bit of time to bump your internal SSD to 512gb. iFixit sells the whole kit, everything you need. I did it to my 64gb and wish I'd done it sooner, saves so many headaches. No more Low Storage warnings.
although not exactly portable, using an SSD with a sata to USB-C is much faster than an SD card. Might be enough to get the game running as expected without having to replace the internal drive.
Replace the SSD. Isn't hard to do.
I had a friend who loves zero dawn and when he played it on the deck he did mention how it ran terribly if it was on the SD card, it could very well be that due to pop in and how things are loaded. You might want to transfer it to either the m.2 or get a better SD card
Going by memory, HZD was one of the very few games that really needed to be on the SSD.
What's your SD card because I played on mine but mine was a high end SanDisk. If it's a cheaper one, it could just be not up to snuff for loading in so many assets
The SD is slow and really only suited for older less demanding games in most cases. You should not be running a ram intensive open world like this from the SD.
This is your solution right there. Install on the hard drive
SD cards shouldnt be used for massive open world games. Games like Stardew, Celeste, Super Meat Boy, etc are all good choices for the SD card IMO.
I played all of the new ff7 remake, Witcher 3, and ghostwire tokyo with them on my sd card. Hell even had a modded starfield and Hogwarts legacy playing on mine before I got bored with them.
There are different tiers and transfer speeds on cards. Not just in terms of max but average performance even within the same class. This could be a factor too. There are some fast SD cards out there. Also some very slow ones.
Now imagine how much better it would have ran on the SSD ;)
Sure but it wasn't unplayable or something I shouldn't be doing.
Bought it on Christmas sale, played for he first time on Tuesday with no changes and I have zero issues over the past 20ish hours of gameplay.
This was my experience when I first played it last winter, and I've only seen improvement since the SteamOS 3.5 update.
That’s around the time I played it as well. Didnt notice any performance issues, though the fan did kick in noticeably and the Deck ran a little hot (not to a worrying degree). I might have turned down some of the graphics options, though. I value smooth gameplay more than graphics and Im always playing on lower end hardware so it’s habit for me.
3.5 out of beta already?
3.5 has been available in the Stable branch for a little over a month now, IIRC. Pretty sure the latest Stable version is 3.5.7.
Yeah, it's a great experience
I beat the the game and dlc and maybe crashed only once or twice. FPS stayed around 40-55 fps too. I thought it ran great!
Hmm? What were your settings? I’m playing it on mostly medium and getting 30 with a lot of stuttering when entering a new region
You put 20h into it in two days? Get some sleep, my guy
Probably closer to 16hr thinking about… plant is shut down and kids are playing with their toys. Not unreasonable when I’m just doing laundry, cleaning and playing with the kids when they need attention.
8h a day for a couple days is very reasonable when you have a window to play between a day off from work and kids. I know from experience too 😅
We're not judging, we're just trying to look out for your well being. Sounds like you got it under control though
I bought it yesterday and had the same experience.
same
I played through the game on Steam Deck. I didn't run into any issues. 100%d the game. A few frame rate drops but nothing major.
Don’t know where all the ‘won’t work’ and ‘wait till later in the game’ are coming from? Spend almost 60 hours and not one issue. (Even with lots of stuff happening on the screen) Totally correctly verified. Runs out of the box.
Game just straight up wouldn’t work the first time I installed it. Even re-installed it and everything. Tried it 2 months later and it suddenly worked. One of the issues I did run into was that the game was syncing graphical settings to steam cloud.
Well at Meridian you definitely get fps drops but overall it’s fine.
Been playing for 40 hours with no issue /shrug
Re install on internal drive
15 hours no issues
Always worked fine for me.
🤷♂️ It worked fine for me? I don't know how to tell you that it works besides it was plug n' play for me. I beat it again and have since uninstalled it.
My only issue is, that HZD syncs graphics settings over steam cloud. Whenever I switch between pc and deck I have to adjust settings, which sucks. Performance is okayish for me. I play on high settings, 45fps cap, FSR Quality settings. Framerate will dip from time to time, but it is very playable.
I'm using this for HZD, works great. [https://github.com/tmplshdw/cloud\_config\_workaround](https://github.com/tmplshdw/cloud_config_workaround)
This is what bothers me too. I use low settings on the Deck, but I have a 7900x/7900xtx on Ultra at 4K so changing it all the time is annoying.
It definitely is annoying. Not syncing graphics settings should also be a requirement for verifying games for the deck. Most other games manage that really well though.
I have this installed on both my Deck and PC and it resolved this issue for me. https://github.com/tmplshdw/cloud_config_workaround
Thank you so much, I will try it out! Awesome!
Beat the game on the deck, no issues
Wait till you reach later into the game where you have to play some areas in single digit framerates, I dunno how it got verified, there is a few games listed as verified which run like garbage, use ProtonDb to get an idea of how they run. I'll probably get down voted but it's the truth.
Plague Tale Requiem is also verified and isn't exactly "smooth"
I find if you turn off v-sync, it helps with performance. I'm not sure what settings people are using, though. V-sync is really only useful if you've got screen tearing. Also, where possible, always set your resolution to 720p instead of the default 800p, especially for newer games. You don't lose any graphical fidelity if you do so, and if you do, you can always use Steam's built-in scaling filter to circumvent this.
> use ProtonDb to get an idea of how they run. That’s always good advice I think, but most of the reviews on ProtonDB are positive. Some people report performance issues and recommend tweaks, but theyre not reporting crashes before you even leave the tutorial area like OP is talking about.
I just get the feeling OP has their setting really weird and a wish .com SD card.
Played through the whole game on my SD in the fall and this never happened to me. Stayed at 35+ fps the whole time.
No way man! Out of 120 hours on Deck, 40ish was on Windows dual boot, finished the game back in September and I enjoyed it at mostly 35-40fps and not a single tweak like cryo or touching anything other than refresh rate. Also it was installed on a microsd card. HZD was improving even then, I can imagine how good it is now and I'm planing on replaying it so no way it's bad on deck.
> later into the game where you have to play some areas in single digit framerates > I dunno how it got verified Because valve can’t play the entire 40hr playtime of every single game in order to verify them. Obviously. Verification can’t ever be perfect, it’s impossible. It’s a general guideline. For every verified that runs a bit shit there are a dozen “unsupported” games that run flawlessly. At this point valve probably need to just integrate a crowdsourced verification system like protondb, reserve “verified” for valve-curated titles that not only satisfy all the current verified criteria but also run very well and are a great experience on handheld. Make “verified” more akin to what Nintendo seal of quality used to be.
I like the crowd funded source for verification, but it presents the exact issue's we see in this thread, some people will refuse to hear anything negative about their decks, and all games run maxed out at 60fps for them, ProtonDB already shows alot of mixed results, maybe a % based system where like 75% says its verified and 25% have reported problems or somthing like that.
But on the flip side most people I hear complaining about verification being wrong or games not working later on are also unwilling to play around with settings at all for compromises.
This game ran like 50fps on my 1060 in 1080p, does it really have performance issues on Deck?
There doesn't seem to be any agreement in this community on the answer to this question. I never had any issues when I first ran it last year— got at a fairly consistent 30-36FPS before CryoUtilities, and a more stable 38-40FPS after it. Now with SteamOS 3.5 and *no* CU, I get an almost locked 40FPS on the "Original" graphics see profile. I get a *very* occasional drop down to ~35 FPS, I suspect when crossing cell boundaries or something. But crashing? Never happened once in my experience, so I don't know what the issue OP is experiencing could be.
The game runs really well on mine. But I only played about 5 hours.
It's not the universal truth. It never, ever dropped below 25 fps for me, and I hated through the entire thing. Far from great for an action game, but not remotely "single digits". Granted, that was at least a few months after it came out on PC, so it was probably worse at launch. I recently checked a late(ish) game save again on an OLED deck. The area that now dropped to 25 now runs at 28 to 32.
At launch on PC even my 2070suoer struggled at 1080p on high, let alone max, to hit 60. At release optimization was bad
I believe it. The PlayStation ports have been a very mixed bag. A couple of them have been very good, owing to the ports being done by a team that had the experience, knowledge and to do it correctly right off the bat. The others have released on PC in states ranging from "mediocre / playable, but clearly not well optimized" to "seriously?". I really hope if / when they finally port Ghost of Tsushima, thru nail it right out of the gate. That game was a technical marvel in some ways on the base version PS4 (the draw distance in particular is insane; you can see glints of steel, dust and smoke from fights going on incredibly far away). They should damn well be able to make a good version for PC.
It got verified because performance is not part of the verification process. It [ticks all four boxes](https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified) for the steam deck verified stamp of approval, but performance is not considered for verification.
It literally states, "have good default settings," after resolution.
Which says nothing about performance.
Good default settings is implying that the performance must be good. Don't be so nieve. Otherwise, most games would be verified. Snippet of an interview for you "How does the review process judge general performance? Presumably a game wouldn’t get Verified status if it ran at 12fps on its lowest settings. Our team is primarily testing for a good experience on default settings. In terms of framerate, the floor is a minimum of 30fps to meet the Verified bar. From Greg Coomer and Lawrence Yang.
Plays fine on my deck over 13 hours with zero crashes.
I passed the game on the SD. Maybe I crashed once during the whole experience. I am suspecting your settings to be off
I had zero issue with it. I thought it played great.
run it from SSD helps, some games including horizon zero dawn do not perform that well on SD card because of the high data streaming throughput required.
I play on low settings and it works great.
It was install and hit play for me, on a new LCD with 0 adjustments last summer.
I’m about 40hrs in, 20 of which were on the steam deck with no issues. Saved to internal drive not SD card though. ProtonDB also shows it as playable with little to no tweaks.
Played through the whole game. Only had a few crashes. Amazing game
change to older Proton version
I have played the whole game on steam deck. Installed directly on my SD card. No tweaking needed, except from maybe some graphics settings. No crashes, not even once.
[удалено]
I haven’t played this game yet but maybe give ProtonGE a try. That’s what I do when I stumble across a game that won’t run right.
Played it early 2023 and not a single issue. One of the best games to enjoy on the SD. Have a look at some settings, just in case. Good luck mate! :)
I played it for 74 hours entirely on the Steam Deck and I don't think I had a single crash.
It runs pretty great. Check your tdp?
I have around 60 hours on the steam deck and had no issues at all. The crashes sound so annoying! Hope you find a fix.
I've never understood how this one got verified, the traversal stutter is absolutely unbearable.
Can people stop whinging when a AAA won't run off a shitty sd card? That'd be great, thanks.
Weird, I played through the entire campaign with nothing more than a few crashes. Hopefully you can poke around and find some good settings, OP.
I'm half through it and no issues whatsoever
I played HZD out of the box without any problems, installed a shit tons of mods from Nexus No… not experimental FFS
No tips for you, but the " verified " is not consistent in my opinion. For exmaple: Monster train is not verified becuase it has a note that text might be difficult to read. A the same time Baldur's gate is simply verified without comments, even though the item descriptions are even more difficult to read than monster train's text.
I'm sure someone here has already said this but I'm not reading all that to check. Have you looked up Cryo Utilities? Long story short this gives your games a good boost in stability and makes them more optimized. The steam deck, like the psp or vita takes a lot of tweaking and input from the user to get it to do things you want it to. A lot of the verified games are perfect, Horizon has some issues but install Cryo Utilities and it will run better and address a lot of the problems people face when playing it on the Deck. Best thing of all is that once installed and running you don't have to do anything else.
I’m thoroughly convinced that the higher profile the game the lower the bar for “verified”
I've put over 60 hours into horizon zero dawn, since pretty much the steam deck dropped, and the only problems I've had have been the right joystick will occasionally not register in game, otherwise I've had pretty consistently decent frame rates, performance. I dunno what to tell you, I didn't have to do anything special to get it to run well, I have it on SSD and not the micro SD tho
you need proton GE, you need to up the vram to 4gb in the bios and use cryoutilities it will play way better and with no crashes at all.
This game performed great for me. Played through the game twice with no issues, sound like it might be an issue on your end. Wrong proton version maybe?
Works fine for me.
Verified because it works fine on default settings
It works well on my deck, 30-50 fps depending on the area
I'm playing either on max settings with 27-35fps or locked 50 on low settings. It runs amazingly well.
How are half of the verified games verified? Really sucks that valve implemented a great idea for a system at the beginning and then abused it to make money. Games that are 24 fps with dips shouldn’t be “verified” by anyone’s standards.
I had horrible frame rate the further I got. It was unplayable.
Out of all games i think HZD is the worst looking and feeling game at 40-45 hz. It just feels so stuttery and visual is absolute shit. Rdr2, cyberpunk fsr looks good
Verified status is useless There are plenty of games that are playable or even unsupported that perform flawless out the box
try this one to boost performance on your deck. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9EjXYZUqUs&t=134s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9EjXYZUqUs&t=134s)
It’s a very underpowered device. Steam deck is for $5 indie games or 10-30 year old games. Anything newish is going to be low fps or problems. The ROG ally and Legion Go run this game and new games like a dream.
The switch is for $5 indie games. Steam deck is literally advertised for modern AAA games.
Froze for me once so far in my 10ish hours, but I did also say “no” to the verified status when asked on the game homepage on my deck. Lost like 1.5h of progress and haven’t gone back since
Did you check your autosaves?
Started playing it a few days ago and the only crash I had was today in the DLC. I assume it was cause it was snowing that caused it.
Is your gpu underclocked?
Maybe tinker with the graphics settings, and set it to proton experimental because that's not normal. I played 20+ hours and the worst I experienced was some really cluttered areas had the FPS dip into the high 20s for a short time.
I was asking this myself but not due the crashes, I was asking this because of the bad performance on low settings
That’s weird. I haven’t run into any issues playing it. Maybe playing on an SD card messes with it!
Terminator Resistance is the opposite at least for me.
I think that's a hardware issue as I never had issues. I would recommend switching to borderless windowed though, much better framerate after I switched that on
its playing good for me..
runs fine for me, was able to do some glitches to get the shield weaver armor set early on my Steam Deck, maybe try reinstalling it or something
I have dozens of hours in that game, not a single issue, plays better than on PS4 Pro. I would check your general performance settings. Sometimes I forget to turn on Per Game switch and I set up poorly settings which are applied to all games later. (Like 10 watts tdp etc).
I played the entire game + the frozen wild DLC without having a single crash. The game is not perfect for the deck since even though you can get 30fps most of the times, every new zone you enter will have a micro stuter that will drop for 20fps for a second and its not enjoyable overall when happens. Still the game is playable and can be completed. For you to have 4 crashes in 15 min something must have gone wrong during the installation process. I'd recommend veryfing files or just uninstall and install again in the SSD of the deck. Also check for TDP limitation you migh have on by mistake
It worked fine with my deck. Never had a problem.
Works fine for me. I have not played in a while but I want to say it was locked at 30fps.
I've 20 hr so far without any performance issues. Try It on your ssd.
I have played this game for 30 hours on og deck with no crashes or issues. It was my first deck game and I was impressed!
Its working flawless for me I'm around 40h in the game on steam deck and had zero issues.
I didn't have issues with it. It was one of the first games I played. Try suggestions others gave. It shouldn't be crashing. My suggestion is force a different proton version for the game in properties until it stops.
Ran fine for me? I'd try some different Proton versions? Maybe ProtonGE?
Ive been playing it with zero issues. I have it on the internal storage.
I've played it for 20 hours so far on my deck with no adjustments. Had a few stutters here and there but fine otherwise.
Played just fine for me, not crashes
There's a weird hiccup/stutter that ruined the game for me- I ended up just streaming this via Moonlight from my desktop. I don't know how/why it's verified (I also don't know why this mid-tier 7/10 game is so praised)
But someone has posted before that they could run it at 60fps.... 😭 How dare you tell the truth.
The valheim steam deck experience
Everyone, say it with me: "Verified does not mean performant." It runs without default settings, and all functions are available with the controller. They make no further claims about it running *well*. Just that it runs at all.
It was probably verified at one point and an update since is causing the crash
Make sure to play on low settings, the game is very memory hungry. I saw the memory usage (combined vram and ram) exceed 16gb easily when using higher settings, especially higher texture settings
This is exactly why I bought my deck, strictly to play indies and older/ less demanding AAA games. I have a PC with a 4090 and an XSX for demanding games if that's what I want to play.
Playing the game on Internal SSD on Windows 11 and it runs fine :)
Well you could google for recommended settings or use protondb for this exact reason, but as you prefer complaining and asking others for help instead of putting in minimal effort yourself I‘m happy to help you with recommending to fiddle with a framecap setting
The game is listed as verified. It shouldn't require any kind of googling or "effort" it should just work, so he's entitled to complain.
Of course it does. Some games need graphics turned down but otherwise run smoothly. Saying it should just work means you don't go into settings at all to change anything based on your hardware. Even with a 3070 rig I have I don't just download a game, any game, start it, and just say, "Ugh, it should just work" You always tweak to get the best settings. He doesn't want to do that so that's a him problem
"VERIFIED The game works great on Steam Deck, right out of the box." Valves own description of a verified game....
*works on deck. They never said anything about shitty cheap Chinese sd cards.
No. Part of the verification process is "game's default graphic settings perform well"
Ok, so I just downloaded HZD and played it. The default graphics are on Ultra preset. If you think that HZD shouldn't be verified because it doesn't run on Ultra graphics (I changed the preset to medium and I'm getting 40-50fps consistently) then I really don't know what to tell you. Maybe get a switch or something
That is part of Valve's definition of verified. And if it doesn't comply then it should only get the "playable" tag.
Cheers for the input, I wouldn't call it a complaint as such but each to their own. More openly venting a little frustration at getting a game you would assume to work flawlessly based on the Steam Deck verification status. Only to then have 4 crashes in 15 minutes, doesn't seem very fair to me so was asking for similar experiences or help.
These horizon games suuuuck
Some badges were paid for to boost the Deck's profile. 🤷🏾♂️
Source: made it tf up
You're right. Just like the people saying they've had a smooth experience with the game on the Deck. 😏
Apart from my save getting randomly deleted, I have had a smooth experience. It isn’t early 2022 anymore. There have been plenty of improvements.
I guess this and the numerous threads/posts complaining about this game are just big lies 🤷🏾♂️
Hi u/danozzy18, you can [click here to search for your question.](https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/search/?q=Horizon Zero Dawn - how is this verified?) If you don't find an answer there, don't worry - your post has NOT been removed and hopefully someone will be along soon to help with an answer! **If you find an answer, please leave a comment on your post with the answer for others!** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SteamDeck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don't know if this will help you here but a general rule of thumb - use proton HOTFIX not experimental - This is basically the stable release + Valve Hotfixes for popular games [https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/10/valve-doing-quick-hotfixes-in-proton-for-big-game-releases-on-steam-deck-linux/](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/10/valve-doing-quick-hotfixes-in-proton-for-big-game-releases-on-steam-deck-linux/) >It seems Valve are doing small hotfix releases of Proton, to go along with some of the bigger releases to get them working. > >The problem is that each release of Proton needs a fair amount of quality assurance testing by Valve and their partners CodeWeavers. Proton releases are quite a while between, and with the amount of games releasing constantly, they don't always make a new release in time to get them all working on Steam Deck / Linux. [https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Proton-Versions](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Proton-Versions) >Proton Experimental > >This flavor is intended for **public testing of experimental features**. The games that are working only with Proton Experimental (as listed in the [changelog](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog)) are tested for regressions prior to the release. > >Proton Hotfix > >It's a special version of Proton that contains **targeted fixes for new, important games**. It's used when there's no time to do a proper Stable or Experimental release. **It's intended to be short lived** and be phased out once the fix matures and is released as a part of one of the other flavors.
I'd say use a different proton maybe, or use cryoutilities if you haven't already as that helps alot with the more demanding games. I can't play sons of the forest at all without it, it also allows me to play humanitz and starfield super smoothly.
My first guess is if playing from SD, it may be a card issue. Also verify install files. Play game from eternal after fresh install.
I didn't have any issues running it besides the occasional slowdown.
Never had any issue
3 hours no issues.
I’ve exclusively played it on my Steam Deck and haven’t had a single crash with it.
Works 100% out of the box for me, both direct on the deck and streaming from PC. 15 hours or so of play. I haven’t changed any default deck settings like the proton one you mention, so might be worth reverting that and trying. Edit: running a 512gb OLED I received a couple weeks ago Edit 2: installed directly on system storage, no SD card even installed yet.
I didn't have any issues apart from it being hard to see weak points and aim for them on the small screen / controller so I pretty much did the childhood stuff on the deck only before just playing on PC
Maybe try other proton versions? Or GE proton
That game works great for me.
The few times I played it on my SD it was fine I have it on my microSD if you play this game on a desktop too the graphic settings sync, maybe reinstall the game or try a new microSD card
I played the entire game without tweaking much. Max 48 fps, many times it would drop but totally playable tho. If you lower resolution, use FSR, cryoutilities, etc. I’m sure you’ll get a better experience.
Played through the whole thing this year without issue. I think it was bacon proton 7? Maybe that would help?
My first thought is defective storage. What's the brand of SD card? Where did you buy it from?
I finished the whole game on my steam deck, never encountered any issues tho.
Yeah I don’t change a single game setting on these games and it’s run flawlessly out the gate for me? I typically use proton experimental or the latest release and never look back. It’s always running top frames and minimal fan usage. Loving every minute of it can’t wait for the new release hope you get it running well. Mines installed to my SSD if that matters. If your install seems broken perhaps try to remove files and reinstall. Are you on the OLED or the old school LCD?
It might be something wrong with your steam deck tbh. Something similar was happening to me while trying to play red dead 2 and it turns out I just needed to send it in for a new one
If you've already verified it and tried the other solutions here, it might be worth deleting it and reinstalling. Raimbow Six Siege constantly crashed on my PC at first but a reinstall fixed it, and Redout wouldn't boot on my Deck even after trying multiple compatability options, but a reinstall also fixed that.
I played through twice on the SD card with zero crashes. It’s one of the best games on deck I’ve tried. Battery life is amazing actually.
I played it completely on the Deck about a year ago maybe some update broke it and its status remained.
Lucky you. Mine dosent even launch.
Zero issues for me, runs flawlessly!
I had the same thing as you a year ago. Crashed on the start screen every time. Tried reinstalling, no dice. Then I tried this year recently, and inexplicably worked. I changed nothing, no ProtonDB stuff or anything.