TheGreatTave
Published
Used the Steam Deck 40fps cap.
Some text is hard to read, like the descriptions on perks and weapon upgrades, but it's not too small to be illegible. The subtitles were a tad too small for my liking, but there is an option to increase the subtitle size.
I used the lowest settings in borderless windowed with FSR set to balanced and for the most part I got around 40-60 fps. I always cap my frames around whatever the 1% lows are so in this case I capped them at 40fps. However, in some of the late game battles (last 3 chapters in particular) I noticed drops down to 30fps fairly consistently. This became distracting so I would sometimes change my frame rate cap to 30fps then raise it again to 40 after the battle. This game has a motion blur setting, but it's not a very good implementation, at least not for 30fps in my opinion. A 30fps cap is still very playable though, so you could do that or just deal with the last few chapters having some battles where the frame rate dips when a lot is happening.
Also this game is fairly dark in some spots, I would sometimes change the gamma setting to compensate for it. I'm using an LCD Steam Deck, I would have to imagine an OLED Steam Deck would make this game look really good.
40 hz refresh rate, 40 fps cap
FF7R can get blurry when setting a high framerate cap in game, but setting it higher can help the game run smoother. So here's what I did:
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In game settings: Borderless Windowed, 1600x900 resolution (this fixed the blurry environments/textures), low textures, low shadows, 60 fps framerate limit, 0 characters displayed.
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SteamOS settings: 40hz/40fps cap, allow tearing on, FSR upscaling, sharpness 3. You can run 45/45 for a smoother experience, I didn't see many dips below 45, but I chose 40/40 because the only dips I ever saw below 40 were stutters and not normal fps dips.
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I also used Cryoutilities to change the swap file on Linux, just follow his tutorial on YouTube. I didn't run FF7R before using Cryoutilities, so I'm not sure how much it effected this game in particular.
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This gave me a very smooth and non-blurry experience. There were some stutters at first, but they cleared up within about 10 minutes, after that I experienced a stutter once every 15-30 minutes or so, not enough to ruin the game. With the exception of chapters 8, 9, and 14. Those chapters did stutter some, but it's mostly side quests so it wasn't too bad. Setting the on screen characters to 0 helped with stutters here, but didn't fix it entirely. Never had a single stutter during combat, which was nice.
Set TDP to 3 watts and GPU clock to 200, both minimum values. Game has been locked at 60 fps with an estimated 6 1/2 hours of battery life. Also using exclusive full screen, vsync on, and allow screen tearing in battery settings.
Game plays flawlessly, only did tinkering with power settings to extended battery life even more.
Some areas just tank the frame rate, usually not while in combat though.
Most of the game runs great, but some spots will tank the frame rate hard. I decided on a 40fps cap since the frame rate usually dropped to around 30-35, then I lowered the render resolution a bit to get the worst spots up to 40. You can probably run this game at 60+, but you will get frame drops in some areas, since I prefer to cap at a frame rate that is stable, I decided on 40. I played on a Steam Deck OLED. Here are my visual settings:
Windowed Borderless
1280x720
Dynamic Res off
Unlocked frame rate on (capped at 40 with Steam Deck quick settings)
Vsync off
TAA
Resolution scale 80%
Everything set to low except Anti-aliasing, I set it to high
This gave me an almost perfect locked 40fps, I only ran into one place where it dropped below that. I played a bit on an external monitor and the 80% resolution scale did make it a bit blurry, but the game looked great on the Steam Deck itself.
