Out-of-Box Experience

When we first launched God of War Ragnarök on our ROG Ally, we were impressed by the performance in the starting area, snowy Midgard. We were so impressed, in fact, that we played the game for almost three hours in one sitting. The game allowed us to use 1080p resolution and FSR Quality, along with most settings turned to High or Ultra, with the frame rate never dropping below 30 frames per second.


Then we reached the second major area of the game, the Dwarven Realm, also known as Svartalfheim, and performance took a nosedive. We had to drop the resolution to 900p, as well as drop most settings down a notch or two, and we still experienced an occasional sub-30 FPS drop.

The game remained playable, but we realized that we couldn't benchmark its performance in Midgard because that wouldn't paint a realistic picture of the game's performance on PC handhelds. Instead, we selected a relatively intense Svartalfheim action set piece that pushed both handhelds to their limits. This is why you might find our performance numbers a good bit lower than in many other God of War Ragnarök handheld performance benchmarks.


Besides the massive performance drop when reaching Svartalfheim, we didn't encounter any issues or bugs on the ROG Ally. The game ran smoothly, with zero shader and traversal stuttering. You will have to wait for the shader compilation to finish after you initially launch the game, which doesn't take too long. That said, you can start your God of War Ragnarök journey even before shaders finish compiling, but you will encounter serious stutters each time a new visual effect is shown for the first time.

The game plays wonderfully on ASUS ROG Ally and Steam Deck's inbuilt controllers, and there's no reason to use a mouse and keyboard to play God of War Ragnarök.


After roaming around Svartalfheim a bit and finding our benchmark scene, we saved the game and downloaded God of War Ragnarök to our Steam Deck. The game loaded into the main menu without issues, but the shader compilation took much longer to finish compared to the ROG Ally. Once the shaders compiled we tried loading one of our Svartalfheim saves but were greeted with a crash to the home screen.

We switched between multiple Proton versions, tried the latest Proton GE, and even increased the UMA buffer (VRAM allocation) to 4 GB, but no dice. The game just didn't let us load into any of our Svartalfheim saves. Midgard manual saves worked well, and the game ran reasonably well in the starting, snow-covered area of God of War Ragnarök, but as soon as we tried to load into Svartalfheim, the game would crash.


Then we switched Proton again, which initiated shader compilation—each time you switch to a different Proton version, the shader cache gets deleted—and we accidentally loaded one of our Svartalfheim saves during shader compilation. And, for some reason, the game loaded without issues. We played the game on our Deck for about half an hour with zero issues—as seen on our Steam Deck screenshots—even after the shader compilation finished. But as soon as it finished, any attempt at loading a different Svartalfheim resulted in a hard crash to the home screen.

This bug disappeared after the second patch went live, and we are happy to report that the game now works fine on Steam Deck, no matter which area you're in. Steam Deck performance also isn't that bad. Yes, you've got to use FSR Balanced and drop everything aside from textures and Anisotropic Filtering to Low, but you'll get playable frame rates with occasional dips to high 20s that feel much smoother than Space Marine 2, which can drop to below 20 frames per second during intense action sequences when tons of Tyranids are on-screen simultaneously.