I wanted to briefly talk about a new site – Steam Deck HQ. In a nutshell, this website covers specific games, how they work on the Steam Deck, and what the best settings are for balancing optimal battery life while maintaining a smooth framerate. Games covered so far include:

  • Hitman 3
  • Guilty Gear -Strive-
  • Horizon Zero Dawn
  • Firewatch
  • Devil May Cry

When accessing the home page of the site, you’ll get a nice banner image for each game covered. You can cycle between the banners by holding the mouse button and dragging across the screen, or by clicking the left and right arrow buttons. You can then click “Click Here” to access the review for that game. Underneath the banners is the “Recent Posts” section.

As an example, here I am checking out the review for Guilty Gear -Strive-. Underneath the game logo you’ll see the ProtonDB ranking and the icon that Valve uses for Steam Deck compatibility. For Guilty Gear, we can see the ranking is Gold, and the Deck status is Unverified. If you click the “Gold” button you’ll be taken to the ProtonDB reports.

steam deck hq game review logo example

The post then goes on to describe what the best settings would be for running the game on the Deck. For Guilty Gear, even though it’s not Verified, it runs very well for the most part. The author of the post mentions using the following settings:

The game is playable at the best settings with native resolution, but there are some changes I would make to make it still look great and save some battery. I found the sweet spot to be 1152x720 with the scaling resolution around 80. Pair this with FSR turned on with sharpness at 3-5 and quality looks fantastic.

They do mention the game has a few caveats:

There was one instance where my framerate slowed during a battle to 7 FPS for about 2 seconds until bouncing back and I was stuck at a victory screen twice…My icons for the controls in-game also changed to keyboard, so I had to go into system settings and change the Button Display Format to “Controller”. The game also doesn’t show Steam Deck controller icons, instead showing Xbox icons. Other than some text being a bit on the small side, the game performed very well with no other bugs appearing.

And further goes on to mention certain stages that caused a bit of a lag spike, preventing the game from attaining a full 60 FPS.

Finally, you can get a quick synopsis of the review at the bottom of the post, and see what are the recommended settings as well as what you can expect for performance at maximum graphics quality.

steam deck hq guilty gear summary

Of course, should you want to add feedback to a particular review, you can post comments if you like.

If you want, you can request a game review by filling out their Google form. They also have a Discord server as well as Twitter.

I will certainly be keeping my eye on this site; I like how it looks and since I will be getting my Deck very soon I’m going to want to know what the optimal settings will be for the games that I play on it.

Check the website out!