Persona 3 Reload Steam Deck Optimized Settings and Performance Overview

Salal Awan February 5, 2024

Persona 3 Reload is out now for PC and consoles. Here’s a look at the performance of the game running on the Steam Deck OLED.

Valve’s handheld PC has been able to manage quite well in terms of modern releases and only had issues with the more ambitious releases like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Persona 3 Reload doesn’t appear to stress test the hardware as much, however, the performance of the game can be labeled as disappointing on the Steam Deck.

Persona 3 Reload Steam Deck Optimized Settings

Settings To Run At Stable 60 FPS

Graphics Quality: Custom
Rendering Scale: 50%
Shadow Quality: High
Background Brightness: Default
Frame Rate Limit: 60
Reflections: Off

These settings will offer you the most stable performance in the game at 60 FPS. There is an issue with how the game appears to render some light sources which is why it can randomly drop the frame rate.

Settings To Run At Stable 30 FPS

Graphics Quality: Custom
Rendering Scale: 100%
Shadow Quality: High
Background Brightness: Default
Frame Rate Limit: 30
Reflections: Off

In addition to this, make sure to lock the frame rate using the Steam Deck OS to 30 FPS. If you are on OLED, this will offer the most stable frame time and performance. You will also get more battery life out of the system, around 5 to 6 hours using these settings provided you also tweak the TDP.

If you want slightly better performance, you can settle on 40/45 FPS depending on whether you have the LCD or OLED Deck. This is also quite smooth overall but the game can’t really hold this performance in Tartarus no matter what you do. It can also drop during some of the heavier sections where there are a lot of NPCs. Tweaking the shadows doesn’t appear to do much, however, reflections should always be disabled as they are ray-traced reflections so they are quite costly on the hardware.

While the performance of the game is not ideal at this moment, Atlus can always release a patch later to fix the issues that are occurring regarding frame rate on the Steam Deck, and potentially other PC hardware.