Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden will debut on PC, Xbox Series consoles, and PlayStation 5 on February 14, 2024. If you’re planning to play the game on the Steam Deck, I have quite good news – it’s really well optimized and fully playable on Valve’s device.
I also encourage you to read the review of Banishers, as it could be one of the best action RPG titles this year. I had a great time, and the significant similarities to the new God of War games should appeal to those who like dynamic and cinematic adventures.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden on Steam Deck – optimized graphic settings
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden runs on the Unreal Engine 5, which poses quite a challenge for the Steam Deck. I’ve thoroughly checked all the graphic options, and below you’ll find my suggestion, on which the game runs at a solid 36 FPS for the OLED version and 30 FPS for the LCD:
- Display mode: Fullscreen
- Screen resolution: 1280×800
- Maximum frame rate: Unlimited
- Vertical synchronization: Enabled
- Anti-aliasing: TAA (looks much better in motion than FSR 2)
- Resolution scaling: 74% for OLED (36 FPS), 78% for LCD (30 FPS)
- Motion blur: Optional
- View distance quality: Low
- Foliage quality: Low
- Texture quality: High
- Effects quality: Low
- Shadows quality: Low
- Post processing quality: High
- Anti-aliasing: High
- HDD compatibility mode: Enable
- In SteamOS, lock the screen refresh rate at 72Hz (36 FPS) for OLED or 60Hz (30 FPS) for LCD
Starting with the last item – HDD compatibility mode shouldn’t matter for the fast SSD in the Steam Deck, but after enabling this option, I noticed fewer stutters during exploration at the cost of slightly slower loading textures. Valve’s hardware has a relatively slow processor and RAM, so the problem can’t be completely eliminated, and lowering the texture quality didn’t improve anything for me.
Check the screen scaling yourself, but in my opinion, TAA (more precisely, TSR from UE5) looks decidedly better than AMD FSR 2 in motion. Just turn the camera and look at the vegetation – Epic’s technology offers a much more stable image. I recommend keeping post-processing on high because this way, we don’t disable all the effects in the game responsible for building the atmosphere. Any attempt to choose better details for drawing range ended in significant performance drops for me.
In summary, with the above settings, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden runs very stable, and only minor issues occur during location loadings, which can’t be fully eliminated. During combat and dynamic moments, it maintains appropriate gameplay fluidity. I couldn’t even get close to stable 40 FPS, hence my recommendation to lock the game at 36 or 30 FPS.
Interestingly, the Steam Deck does not operate under full load most of the time, allowing for quite long gameplay on a single charge. I optimized the settings for moments when Banishers uses 95-99% of the GPU, hence there’s often a power reserve.
It’s also worth mentioning that the game supports cloud save, controllers and the ability to adjust subtitle size, which are fully readable on a small screen.
I’m almost certain that Valve will rate Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden green during their verification. In my opinion, the game performs much better than many other positively verified titles.
