Despite being an affordable, revolutionary piece of PC gaming hardware, the Steam Deck is beginning to show its age this year. A string of unplayable games in 2024 indicates the AAA gaming world is gradually leaving the Steam Deck behind. And after testing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Valve’s handheld device today, I reluctantly admit Bethesda and Machine Games’ ambitious Indy adventure puts yet another nail in the Deck’s coffin.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle PC Requirements: Ouch!
The first clue that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would give the ole’ Deck some trouble was the steep PC hardware requirements shared by Bethesda earlier this week. You can see in the table below that the bare minimum GPU is an Nvidia RTX 2060 or a Radeon RX RX 6600, both of which eclipse the Steam Deck’s modest Aerith APU in terms of performance and raw specs. (This is also the first game I can recall that demands built-in hardware ray tracing.)
Still, I clung to an outside chance that Valve’s handheld could deliver a marginally playable experience, even if it wasn’t an attractive one.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Steam Deck Performance
I tested Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on my Steam Deck OLED using both Proton Experimental and Proton Hotfix. The awesome news is that it launched without any issue, thanks to Machine Games’ use of the Vulkan API, and the lack of any anti-cheat DRM. Fortunately, this means it should play without issue on desktop Linux distributions using Steam or Heroic; I can confirm it’s playing like a dream on my Bazzite-powered laptop.
Sadly, that’s where the positive side of things ends.
I fired up a new game using the Deck’s native resolution of 1280×800 — with dynamic scaling turned off — and the lowest possible graphics settings. As it transitioned into the opening tutorial with just Indy walking through the jungle, the framerate barely climbed above 23 FPS.
My hope was that enabling dynamic resolution scaling would take things over the 30 FPS threshold. Alas, no joy there. Not only does it exhibit distracting shimmering, but it struggled to hit 30 FPS when any other characters are onscreen or any action is happening.
As a last-ditch effort, I lowered the resolution all the way down to 960×600 and disabled reflections, but it still chugged along mostly below 30 FPS — and these are mostly static gameplay scenarios with no action even happening yet. Cutscenes were also consistently below 30 FPS regardless of graphics settings or resolution.
Like Space Marine II, Star Wars Outlaws, and Final Fantasy XVI before it, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is simply too demanding for Steam Deck. And while this is a major disappointment for people relying on Deck as their only gaming device, it’s a refreshing leap forward for the industry. Credit goes to Machine Games for pushing the envelope on PC graphics and not catering to the lower specs of consoles from Xbox and Sony.
And yes, you might be quick to assume that since Bethesda’s publishing it, the game is poorly optimized, but the opposite seems to be true on both PC and Xbox systems.
Hopefully, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will fare better on the Asus ROG Ally and Legion GO. If you have a good experience on those slightly more powerful handhelds, let me know!
