Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 Handheld Performance

[17th Dimension]

Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 comes 13 years after the original game, putting you once again in the boots of Demetrian Titus, swapping Orcs with huge hordes of Tyranids. The game looks pretty solid on a high-end PC but how does it run on Steam Deck and ROG Ally? Read our handheld performance review and find out.

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[Chrispy_]

It's a shame this doesn't run well on handhelds. 24fps whilst decimating the battery on an Ally at high-TDP, or really borderline playable on a Deck is bad enough to put me off trying it on either.

Even the PS5 and Series S struggle to stay above 30fps. Clearly the CPU requirement of this title is beyond the comfort zone of anything without a relatively fast CPU and the Z1 Extreme is a competent CPU but only if it's chugging down power. With the GPU cores likely needing ~8-10W to even render the scene, the 8 Zen4 cores are fighting hard for Watts that are in very short supply.

 

[mrnagant]

SteamDeck processor really punching above its weight at 15w. Shows how beneficial custom chip can be. I really hope Valve is able to secure a custom chip from AMD instead of settling for cut up Strix Point 2 / Z2 like chip. Pretty lucky really that AMD had something to offer Valve via a cancelled custom chip they happened to have lying around.

 

[vbq7qK68eyYAH4iR]

Thanks for doing the review. Loved the VRAM note. I look forward to your next one.

 

[slopes_95]

Your benchmarks and conclusions don't line up very well.

On Steam Deck you say...

This will make the image quality go down the drain, and you will experience sub-30 FPS frame drops at regular intervals, with some scenes featuring huge enemy hordes beating the hardware to a pulp and dropping the frame rate to below 20 frames per second. And you say... "Is this playable? For me, it isn't, but you do you."

Then on the ROG Ally...

Select the "Manual" power profile and start bumping the TDP value from 16 W upwards until you arrive at a value that gives you playable enough performance. This will prolong battery life to about an hour and a half, perhaps longer if you consider a cinematic frame rate—24 FPS on average—playable.

--- So, Steam deck sub-30 drops and some scenes with huge enemy hordes dropping below 20 fps -- unplayable
--- ROG Ally "average" of 24fps, which essentially guarantees sub 20 fps -- "playable if you consider cinematic frame rate playable"

Seems you're being harsher on the deck, especially since in your benchmarks you show the min frame rate of the deck at 1280x800 as 21.2 fps, and the ROG Ally at 1280x720 at 15.9fps (at 15W) or 21.4fps, same min performance as the deck, but at 25W. And especially since the deck plays 1-1/2 to 2hrs, or nearly 2x as long (these are portables after all) as the 1hr playtime of the ROG Ally at 25W. Of course the OLED Deck would last even longer.

 

[Gigaherz]

Do people really care about the Ally? Id like to see a Legion or an Ally X way more than this avoidable SD-Card burner.

 

[Chrispy_]

Do people really care about the Ally? Id like to see a Legion or an Ally X way more than this avoidable SD-Card burner.

The Ally X is still using the same CPU as the Ally, so does it even matter? Sure, the RAM is a touch faster but benchmarks show that when using the same TDP settings, the difference is within margin of error almost all the time.

 

[kanecvr]

I installed it on my Legion Go out of curiosity. Set to 2k, everything low but effects, shadows and shaders witch are set to medium. resolution set to 2k. v-sync off. FSR2 enabled in performance mode. It's playable with minor ocasional hiccups now and then. Enabling v-sync tanks performance.