The third installment in the Nioh trilogy is much of the same, and in a good way. The series has always been known to be one of the better ‘soulslikes’ out there, blending together brutal combat with fun world progression that makes its stand out in being more than just another difficult game.
That being said, some series traditions still continue to persist though, including the fact that the game runs absolutely poorly on low power devices such as Valve’s Steam Deck.
Indeed, playing the game on the Deck is not really recommended, owing to a combination of optimization issues and the fact that the Steam Deck is aging rapidly, making it unable to run modern games well enough.
That being said, if you’re still bold enough to try out Nioh 3 on the Steam Deck, here’s what you need to know (including a run down of the settings in use).
Best Nioh 3 Settings For The Steam Deck
Visuals
- Display Mode: Borderless
- VSync: Off
- Resolution: 1280×720
- Frame Rate Cap: 30 (Locked)
- Graphics Presets: Very Low
- FPS Dynamic Adjustment: On
Resolution Advanced Settings
- Upscaling Method: FSR 3.1
- Sharpness: 0.2
- Rendering Resolution: 30%
- Dynamic Resolution: Off
- Frame Generation: On
Everything should be set to either Very Low or Off.
The following combination of settings results in a mostly wonky 30 frames per second on the Steam Deck. This is all while making heavy use of FSR 3.1 upscaling and Frame Generation, which comes with some serious drawbacks.
The image presented is quite a blurry mess, and the heavy use of frame gen results in a very noticeable amount of input delay (or lag). In other words, Nioh 3 is technically ‘playable’, but only barely.
Playing this on the Deck is absolutely not recommended for now. If you must, consider alternatives such as streaming using Moonlight and capping the frame rate to 30 FPS.
