God of War Settings for the Steam Deck: Optimized for 40 FPS

With God of War: Ragnarok launching on PC later this month, we decided to take its prequel for a spin on the Steam Deck OLED. Fortunately, the game looks and runs admirably with consistent frametimes and sharp textures. We used a mix of different graphics settings with the resolution set to 720p and got the following results with a custom framerate lock.

Performance and FPS

The Steam Deck delivered an average of 35-40 FPS in God of War using our custom graphics settings. During fights and crowded brawls, framerates dipped to 35-37 FPS, remaining around 40 FPS otherwise. The frametimes were consistent throughout with an average of 25 ms, a peak of 27 ms, and a min 22 ms.

The CPU usage hovered close to 80%, with a 99% GPU utilization, indicating a GPU-bound workload. God of War used over 5 GB of graphics and 12 GB of main memory on the Steam Deck, while (mostly) maintaining temperatures of under 80C.

Graphics Settings

We tested God of War at 720p (1280 x 720) on the Steam Deck, using a mix of “Original” and “Low” graphics settings. V-sync, triple buffering, motion blur, and film grain were disabled, while the display mode was set to “Windowed.” An in-game FPS limit of 40 FPS was enforced while keeping the Deck OS-level refresh rate at 90 Hz.

AMD FSR 2.0 upscaling was enabled using the “Quality” preset with the sharpening filter set to 0.5 or 50%. While not as good as DLSS, this temporal upscaling algorithm holds its own in most scenarios.

Coming to the graphics settings, texture quality, model quality, reflections, and ambient occlusion were set to “Original“, while anisotropic filtering (texture filtering) was put to “High.” Shadows and atmospherics were set to “Low.”

Visual Quality and Battery Life

God of War looks crisp and vibrant on the Steam Deck with HDR enabled, maintaining decent temperatures, and acceptable fan speeds.

Thanks to the high pixel density and the FSR 2 sharpening filter, the textures retain their detail with ample particle effects and shading in the background. The Steam Deck lasted slightly over 2 hours on a full charge while running God of War at these settings.

God of War: Best Steam Deck Graphics Settings