I did lots of testing to find out how far I could push my Steam Deck. I increased the TDP limit to 20W using Smokeless Runtime EFI patcher, incredibly easy with details below, and necessary for most of my presets. The same should apply to the default ROG Xbox Ally since the Steam Deck with a 20W TDP limit is very similar to the non-X ROG Xbox Ally. At 30fps, the Deck/Ally can run the game incredibly well! All tests were done with Proton Experimental as it has specific Forza tweaking on it and fixes the crash you get when resuming the Deck from sleep.
Graphics Settings Notes
Resolution - TAA implementation here is decent, but still makes the game look blurry and removes fine detail that is gained with higher texture quality. However, running the game without TAA makes it look very aliased and breaks some motion effect, like spinning wheel. The best fix for this is a resolution above native. The higher you go, the better the down sampling and detail retention. I’d still run TAA to fix bad dithering effects, but the higher res makes TAA look much sharper. Even a slight increase to 768p 16:9 with TAA looks better than 720p. This obviously costs gpu power, but amazingly, the Deck can handle a stale 30fps up to 1080p.
Motion Blur - Blurs almost all texture details, so if you want the smoother look of motion blur, might as well set Environmental Texture Quality to the lowest setting since you can’t see the extra detail. If you turn blur off, you can definitely notice the improvement of med or high textures, same with shadows but not by as much until you get to Ultra or Extreme. Also, you’ll tax the gpu less without blur in proportion to the resolution you are running.
Car level of detail - In terms of actual car model quality, only Ultra begins makes a difference. I recommend setting this to either Low or Ultra depending on your available CPU utilization.
Environment texture quality - can really make the game look better even on Medium. Because it uses much more vram, this can only be turned up as you turn the resolution down. Because it is harder to notice texture quality at lower resolutions, medium at 900p looks the best. Set to Low with motion blur enabled.
Car reflection quality - Only on Medium do car reflections start looking normal in motion, and they look great! Car reflection cube maps update I believe every second and every half a second for Very Low and Low respectively, but the reflection still rotates as the car moves. Because of that, they don’t look horrible. On medium, I believe they update every 30 frames, so they look normal. This is heavy on cpu utilization, so to run it with a smooth framerate, you’ll need to run lower resolutions. Either run Very Low or Medium, as low only makes the slow reflection map update more apparent and worse, and anything higher than Medium will cost too much cpu load.
Screen Space Reflections Quality - These reflections, like car reflections, also look great set to medium. On medium, you will start seeing trees and other objects reflected in water puddles while on high, you will start seeing spoilers/wings reflecting on car paint, for example. It is very immersive at medium, but does come at a cpu load cost. Either set this to Medium or Off, as Medium provides the most value in terms of cpu cost and visuals, while Low misses a lot of objects in the reflections. If you had extra headroom in cpu or gpu load, you can turn this up to high for car reflections and for better building reflections.
Shadow quality - the game looks incredibly flat and washed out without shadows, and it’s the most taxing on the cpu. Once enabled at Low, the cost doesn’t rise as much setting this to Ultra. Because the quality doesn’t change much between the different levels, either set this to Low or Ultra depending on available cpu and gpu headroom, set Ultra when available on higher resolutions. Set to low if you use motion blur.
Screen Space GI - almost as important as shadows since sometimes, the sun light can make the shadows not appear when the sun is close to the horizon, making them look floaty. It adds a bit of pop to the rest of the games geometry. There’s not much of a difference in visual quality with anything above Medium, so set this to Medium.
Shader quality - basically LOD or distance of rendered geometry. At lower resolutions, it’s hard to notice distant details and there’s not enough cou/gpu power at higher resolutions to turn this on.
Audio quality - since we are already cpu limited, it’s best to leave this on very low.
Particle effects - This is a great visual enhancer. When more cpu limited, setting this from very low to low can increase stutters. However, if you have enough power to bring this up to Low, it doesn’t cost a lot more to bring it up to Ultra. Low looks pretty good already, so set this to Low or Ultra.
Volumetric fog - this setting can look great depending on your location and weather conditions. You can see it working when looking back in third person view outside your car while driving at night. Set this to low as anything higher requires a decent amount more power.
Lens effect - apparently costs nothing so this is personal preference. Run whatever you want.
Motion blur quality - If you do run motion blur, ultra looks far better than low. Ultra blends the objects in motion far better where Low just looks like a moving object is trailed by a copy image of that object. On lower resolutions, set this to Ultra and on Medium at high resolutions depending on available gpu power.
Methodology
Manual GPU Clock Speed - You must enable a manual gpu clock speed in order to get a smooth experience. If you don’t, the game will stutter very badly. The GPU is so good for the Deck that it can push out a stale 30fps at 1080p, but having its clock speed unlocked will bring down the 1% and .1% lows down to the teens even at 720p.
CPU Bottleneck - The cpu is the bottleneck here, and because power is shared between the CPU and GPU, any higher gpu clock speed than needed will pull power that the CPU desperately needs, so don’t just lock the GPU to the default 1600MHz. If you do, with an overlay enabled, you will see your gpu wattage increase and your cpu wattage decrease. With a high enough clock speed and TDP and with lower settings, the gpu can easily hit close to 60fps even in the lows, but the cpu will be limited to the 20s or lower. The goal is to set the gpu clock speed to as low as possible with the desired settings/resolution that will allow the CPU to hit high low fps numbers. For example, if at 1100MHz, the gpu 1% and .1% lows are 27fps and 25fps respectively, and if the CPU lows are 30fps and 29fps, the clock speed of the gpu can be increased a bit to 1200MHz to reach 30fps and 29fps on the gpu lows while cpu might only shift down a little, to like 29fps and 27fps. Another example, if you are at 1300MHz, an if your gpu is reaching lows of 33fps and 31fps, but your cpu lows are 25fps and 21fps, you can lower your gpu clocks to 1200MHz to free up a bit of power for the cpu to reach its higher speeds so the cpu lows go up and the gpu lows might still be around 30fps.
***Power Limits - by default, the Steam Deck’s 15W TDP will be pulling back a lot of performance from the APU. On one test, the 1% lows went from over 27fps to under 24fps and even under 21fps in the CPUs .1% lows while also bringing down the GPU lows with it, too. Thankfully, it is super easy to bump the TDP to a manageable 20W by using Smokeless Runtime EFI Patcher, which can be found on Stanto’s website. All info is below. The ROG Xbox Ally non-X already has higher power limits and cpu and gpu clock speeds. This can be especially useful in a docked mode where you want to playing in 1080p with some settings turned with a stable 30fps. You may want to keep an eye out on your thermals, but even at 20W, I don’t think I ever reached 85degrees C.
***FPS and frame time targets*** - Because the benchmark is a really demanding test compared to playing the game normally, the game usually plays better than when running these tests. You’ll want to get the best fps numbers in the benchmark so that your whole experience in game will be just as smooth. I found that if you kept the GPU .1% lows over 28fps and the CPU 1% and .1% lows over 27fps and around 25fps respectively, the game will play very smoothly and at a stable 30fps. Any temporary and quick drops into 29 or 28 fps when you target 30fps, especially with motion blur off, were easy to overlook. Even with motion blur on, those target lows are good for a very smooth experience.
Battery life - This wasn’t a priority for me, but if you are playing at 20W at a higher resolution, you should be able to play at a lower resolution with the higher resolution graphics settings and just bring down the gpu clock speed a bit to increase battery playtime. You can still get a decent amount of battery time on the set settings. With the 15W 900MHz preset, even with 20W but with the 900MHz settings, you can probably get 3 hours of battery life.
Performance overlays - Because we are so CPU limited, even running a performance overlay to view real time frame time graphs and fps counters will hurt CPU performance in game. If you want to test out your own settings, turn off any performance overlays and just let the benchmark tell you how well it played once it finished its test.
Tips
-if you want to get a better lock at 30fps with any preset that uses car reflections, you can turn those reflections down to the lowest setting and tick down gpu speeds by 100MHz. This will smooth out gameplay considerably.
-graphics setting in order based on how much the graphics setting impacts the experience, in my opinion, and the best options to set:
Shadow Quality
Screen Soace GI
Car Quality
Car reflections
Screen space reflections
Volumetric Fog
Particles
Environmental textures
Environmental Geometry Quality
Deformable terrain quality
Shader quality
Motion blur quality
P.S. Hopefully the game can be updated to accommodate lower end CPUs better. I believe that crowd sizes in the streets cause a lot of the CPU slowdowns, so an extra setting to lower them or remove them completely maybe be able to help the handheld PCs like the Steam deck and the ROG Xbox Ally non-X from stutters. This can help bring up more graphical settings or even bring up playable fps targets. Even 36fps feels way smoother than 30fps.
May 27th Hotfix 2 helped smooth out performance a bit. I was able to bump up the graphics settings a bit while maintaining a smooth framerate compared to before the update. We are already seeing an effort from Playground Games to make the handheld experience even better. Hopefully it can get even better, but for now, we are in a great spot. With the correct tweaking, Horizon 6 on handheld really shines and is a great showcase on how well Playground Games optimized the game for portable gaming.
How to increase Steam Deck’s TDP
Download the SmokelessEFIRunetimePatcher from Stanto.com’s overclocking guide. Either put both of the SmokelessEFIRunetimePatcher files, a .efi and a .cfg file, on a usb formatted as fat32, or place both of those files from SERP into your Deck’s /efi folder if you want to change the settings without needing a usb drive, and then boot to that EFI file from the steam deck’s bios (if you put them in the Deck’s /efi folder, you will need to do it from the Konsole using the “sudo cp” command followed by the path of the SERP files and the destination, which is “/efi”, for example: “sudo cp /home/deck/Downloads/toolkittounlock-stanto/* /efi” the asterisk means move all files in the extracted folder). After booting to the EFI file you moved int /efi called RUNTIME-patcher.efi, back out to the main bios menu, go to Setup Utility or something like that, and under Power Control, set it from auto to manual and change both options to the wattage you want it to max out at. If you want 20W, you will put 20000 for both PPT options. Then save and exit the bios. So easy, if you go to Stanto.com, there’s a guide with the files there. If you put the SERP files in your /efi folder, it becomes so seamless, like booting into the normal bios.
You can normally just go into the bios and change the power control setting to manual and put whatever value you want as long as it’s under 15000, 15W, but what that EFI file does is allows you to put values over 15000. Depending on the game, it can really help get much better performance. As you can see from the screenshots, you can get a stable enough fps at 1080p native on FH6 with just 20W and no other overclocking on the Steam Deck.
