Steam Machine runs Control Resonant well, but Steam Deck support disappoints

Control Resonant runs poorly on Steam Deck but holds up on Steam Machine

Control Resonant turns out to be a strong Remedy-style character action game — but anyone hoping to play it on the Steam Deck is out of luck. Despite earlier suggestions that the game would support Valve's handheld, it simply demands too much power to render its warped version of Manhattan at playable speeds. The more powerful Steam Machine is another matter entirely, so here's a full breakdown of how the game performs on SteamOS hardware, just ahead of launch.

Why the Deck falls short

What stings most is that Control Resonant's graphics menu includes a "Handheld" quality preset — in most games, that's code for "Steam Deck users, pick this one." And technically, the game does run on the Deck without any Proton fiddling. The trouble is performance. On a Deck OLED with the Handheld preset plus FSR Performance upscaling, the framerate barely scrapes 30fps at best.

Out in the city streets where most of the game takes place, those same settings tend to hover in the low-to-mid twenties, with frequent heavy stutters — likely because the Deck's 16GB of shared RAM/VRAM simply isn't enough. Pushing upscaling to Ultra Performance barely helps and actually hurts, compressing the image so much that fights become hard to read. Given how timing-sensitive Resonant's combat is, that's a dealbreaker.

A few extra tweaks exist outside the preset — disabling SSAO and post-processing effects like motion blur — but even those can't lift the Deck past an average of roughly 25fps in most areas, aside from some interiors and late-game zones. It can hit 45fps in those favourable spots, but you'd have to slog through a lot of sub-30fps gameplay to get there. Add in the 105GB install size and the Deck is simply not a recommended way to play.

The Steam Machine fares much better

The Steam Machine is a different story — with caveats. At 1080p with ray tracing off, it stutters far less (its 16GB of RAM is separate from video memory) and manages a playable 40-50fps in demanding open-world areas on the Medium preset at native 1080p. Switching to High drops that to roughly 35-45fps, though at 1080p you can comfortably add FSR Quality upscaling, which brings results of around 50-65fps, if less consistent.

Recommended settings

Each individual option was tested to see if anything major could be gained, but Control Resonant barely responds — one of the least tweakable settings menus around. Dropping lighting and reflections might squeeze out a few frames, but these settings are close to just using High:

• Render resolution: Quality
• Upscaler: FSR
• FSR Sharpness: 50
• Texture resolution: Ultra
• Texture filtering: High
• Level of detail (LOD): High
• Global illumination: High
• Volumetric lighting: Medium
• Volumetric spotlight: High
• Fog: High
• Shadow map resolution: High
• Shadow map filtering: High
• Shadow map detail: High
• Screen space ambient occlusion: On
• Screen space reflections (SSR): Medium
• Signed Distance Field (SDF) reflections: Off
• Ray tracing preset: Off
• Post processing resolution: Render resolution
• Motion blur: Off
• Depth of field: On
• Lens distortion: On
• Film grain: On
• Vignetting: On

All told, this setup delivers roughly a 14% improvement over High plus FSR Quality. That's still worthwhile, especially on a fast gaming monitor rather than a 60Hz TV — these settings produced more 70fps-plus peaks, and the demanding city areas were more likely to hold above 60fps, even with occasional dips into the fifties.

FSR Frame Generation was left off here. It's a matter of taste: the implementation looks smooth rather than choppy, and it can push the game past a perceived 100fps. But it adds input lag, and for melee combat that rewards precise timing, it's a risky trade. Worth experimenting with, though.

Leave ray tracing alone

Ray tracing is where things genuinely go wrong. Enabling it for the first time crashed the game outright, and afterwards it wouldn't launch on SteamOS until switching Proton to the Experimental branch. Even with the Low RT preset running alongside the tweaked settings, framerates sank into the twenties — performance no better than the Deck, on hardware that should be doing far better.

With launch imminent and no official SteamOS compatibility ratings published yet, consider this an early heads-up: Resonant is well worth playing, just not on a Deck — and the Steam Machine remains your best couch-and-sofa option until a patch, if one comes, improves handheld performance.

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun