Key Highlights:
- Bethesda has not confirmed whether Starfield will support Steam Deck when the RPG launches in September.
- Todd Howard says Steam Deck compatibility will be discussed “later down the road”.
- Starfield’s official PC requirements and 30 FPS Xbox target raise significant questions about how well Valve’s handheld could run it.
Bethesda has not confirmed whether Starfield will run properly on Steam Deck, with game director Todd Howard saying the studio will discuss compatibility “later down the road”.
During a recent Kinda Funny Xcast interview, Howard discussed a large-font option designed to improve readability across different displays, including handheld devices. When directly asked whether Starfield would be Steam Deck compatible, however, he stopped short of confirming support:
“We’ll talk about that later down the road.”
Todd Howard
That leaves the Steam Deck question open, but Starfield’s newly published PC requirements give us considerably more information to work with.
Bethesda lists an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K as the minimum processor, alongside 16GB of RAM and either an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. The game also requires 125GB of available storage on an SSD.
Valve’s Steam Deck uses a four-core, eight-thread Zen 2 CPU running between 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz, eight RDNA 2 compute units and 16GB of shared LPDDR5 memory. Its built-in display runs at 1280×800, substantially below the resolution normally targeted by desktop gaming PCs.
That lower screen resolution could reduce the GPU workload considerably, but the CPU and memory comparison is less reassuring. Starfield’s listed minimum desktop processors both offer more CPU cores than the Deck, while its 16GB minimum RAM requirement is separate from dedicated graphics memory. The Steam Deck shares its 16GB pool between the CPU and GPU.
Storage creates another immediate limitation. Starfield requires 125GB, meaning the original 64GB Steam Deck cannot accommodate the game internally at all. The 256GB and 512GB models have NVMe SSD storage, although available capacity will naturally be lower once SteamOS and other software are accounted for.
There is also the Xbox performance target to consider. Howard has confirmed that Starfield will run at 4K and 30 FPS on Xbox Series X and 1440p at 30 FPS on Series S, with Bethesda choosing a locked frame rate to maintain consistency across its large, dynamic environments.
Digital Foundry’s analysis of the June showcase has raised the possibility that some of Starfield’s limitations could be CPU-related because of the amount of world simulation taking place. That remains technical analysis rather than confirmation from Bethesda, but a CPU bottleneck would be harder for Steam Deck users to overcome simply by lowering resolution or graphics settings.
There are reasons not to rule the handheld out entirely. Steam Deck targets only 1280×800, PC players will have access to lower graphics settings unavailable on Xbox, and Howard notably declined to say that Steam Deck support was impossible.
But based on what Bethesda has confirmed so far, there is not enough evidence to say Starfield on Steam Deck is likely at launch.
For now, the more accurate conclusion is that Bethesda is leaving the possibility open while Starfield’s demanding PC requirements make acceptable Steam Deck performance uncertain.
Starfield launches on 6 September 2023 for Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Later update: Starfield did become technically playable on Steam Deck through Proton, with Valve releasing SteamOS fixes around launch to address crashes and a black-screen problem. Performance remained the larger issue, with demanding areas regularly dropping below 30 FPS even at low settings.
Bethesda also told reviewers around launch that it did not recommend playing Starfield on Steam Deck or ROG Ally because performance fell below the game’s minimum PC specification.
Valve currently classifies Starfield as Unsupported on Steam Deck, specifically stating that its graphics settings cannot be configured to run well on the handheld.
Just two days after this article was published, Bethesda also announced Starfield’s AMD PC partnership, with AMD working alongside the studio on PC optimisation and FSR 2 support.
