Final Fantasy XVI Runs On Steam Deck, But Is It Playable?

Final Fantasy XVI demo is available now ahead of the game’s launch on September 17 and it is possible to get a taste of the game’s performance on the Steam Deck.

Square Enix has announced the release date of Final Fantasy XVI on PC today and dropped a surprise demo for the game as well. The demo appears to be playable on the Steam Deck so we decided to give it a chance. There was no need to do any tweaks or anything to get the game running, as it boots up on the first try.

As for the gameplay and performance of getting it to run on the Steam Deck, you can be the judge with the video that we have captured below.

Given that the game is launching within a month, this might be the final PC code that we are running as part of the demo. It includes almost all the major PC graphics options like upscaling, frame generation, graphical tweaks, and so on. You can set your preferred resolution and frame rate target in the main menu before you dive deeper into the demo.

I was testing the game on a Steam Deck OLED and unfortunately, I wouldn’t call it playable. While the game works fine during the gameplay segments, the performance struggles to reach 30 FPS during the Eikon battles, and even during some of the set-piece moments in the game. The bigger issue here is the performance of the cutscenes. While the game does look pretty with HDR enabled on the Steam Deck OLED screen, the super low-quality resolution along with the upscaling enabled in the game makes the character model unrecognizable sometimes.

If you have already played the game on PS5, the Steam Deck can be a good platform to go through the gameplay again but you might have issues with how the cutscenes play out. There are two types of cutscenes in the game, one is real-time, and the other one is pre-rendered. Pre-rendered cutscenes also seem to exhibit some weird performance issues while the real-time ones can look mixed with the resolution dropping too low at times. Maybe there is a fix here if we disable the dynamic resolution scaling option, but I am not sure about the performance impact on the game.

Final Fantasy XVI is out on September 17 for PC.