Season 5 of Diablo 4 is out, bringing with it much needed enhancements and quality of life improvements over the base version of the game. The RPG has also shot up in popularity recently, quickly climbing the charts to become one of the most popular games for the Steam Deck as well.
While Diablo 4 runs on the Steam Deck, it does require a fair bit of tweaking across both the system settings menus, as well as the Deck UI itself. The best, optimized settings tailored for a ‘playable’ experience can be found in detail within the section below.
Optimized Diablo 4 Steam Deck settings
The list of ‘optimized’ settings below will take into account a mostly Medium preset with certain tweaks activated, aiming for a 40-60 frames per second target. As Diablo 4’s frame rates can vary wildly depending on the number of mobs present on the screen (among other factors), readers should expect frequent dips in frame rates throughout their extended gameplay sessions.
In-game settings
Screen
- Display: Windowed (Fullscreen)
- Resolution: 1280×800
- Vertical Sync: Disabled
- HDR: Keep this enabled if you have a Steam Deck OLED.
- Limit Cutscene FPS: Disabled
- Peripheral Lighting: Enabled
Performance
- Resolution Scaling: Default
- Resolution Percentage: 100%
- Sharpen Image: 5
Quality
- Preset: Medium
- Texture Quality: Medium
- Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
- Shadow Quality: Medium
- Dynamic Shadows: Enabled
- Soft Shadows: Enabled
- Shader Quality: Medium
- SSAO Quality: Low
- Fog Quality: Medium
- Clutter Quality: High
- Water Simulation Quality: Low
- Anti-Aliasing Quality: Low
- Geometric Complexity: Medium
- Terrain Geometry Detail: Low
- Physics Quality: High
- Particles: Medium
Steam deck specific settings
- Frame Rate Limit: Cap this to 40 FPS.
- TDP: 12 W
- Battery Drain: 15-20 W. Expect 3-4 hours of battery life, or 6 hours if you own an OLED Steam Deck.
Do keep in mind that these settings were tested on the Steam version of the game. The Battle.net version of the game should perform similarly though, only requiring an extra few steps to set up.
