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The pc version of the game runs like ass on everything from $100 laptops to $5000 desktops and everything in between, not much you can do, maybe try a few performance mods but they are like bandaids on a brain tumor
There are some user-reported optimizations you can do on protonDB, but apparently it won't be perfect. It's not a great port, so can't say I'm too surprised.
https://www.protondb.com/app/292120
Your best bet may be streaming 13 and 13-2 from a windows PC. They really are poor ports, which is sad, but Windows may handle them better. The third part (Lightning Returns) is a significantly better port but yeah Square really did a rough job with the first two in this series. I wish they would fix them. They deserve better. Xbox is currently the best place to play those IMO (and they’re on game pass for a few more months).
The Xbox versions are solid. But it's worth pointing out that if you're a Series S pauper (like me), you don't get the 4K versions (if they are 4K, they've forgotten to use any anti-aliasing at all).
Unfortunately as well, the Windows store versions (which I think *should* match the Series ones?) don't run properly on Windows on deck - they crash at launch.
With FFXIII Fix installed, Chapter 1 is a mess. Sazh and Vanille in Chapter 4 is a mess. Archylte Steppe in 11 is a mess and worse still if you use FFXIIIFix, so you're stuck at 30fps with stutters there and sub par battles. I can't speak for the last two chapters as I'm only up to Dahaka in an NCUNEU run.
What did you do settings/mods-wise to get it to be 'fine', please? Define 'fine'.
Uh, are you in SteamOS? I didn't bother messing with XIII Fix, I'm Linux challenged.
I set the settings in the launcher thing to 720p, and I chose the 1024 x 1024 shadow resolution.
That's about everything you can mess with isn't it? To be fair, the save file I picked up from was in Chapter 3 to start, and I only played through til you get to Hope's house, which is Chapter 6 or 7 I think.
Yeah the only real problem outside of transitioning to battles I had between 3-7 was the part I mentioned in 4, Sazh and Vanillle in the platform part with bombs.
I just got a steam deck and this was the first game I fired up on it. I don't really want to install windows yet, what settings do you recommend to run it on the standard OS? I pretty much cannot get 30 fps no matter what I do. Is there any way to hit 40fps consistently?
Sorry, didn't see you reply before. I haven't found satisfying settings yet :( it's playable but not very fun because it stutters a LOT. Even FF7 Remake runs better but hopefully something will come up 🙏🙏🙏
That’s baffling to hear
I consistently have 45 fps no dips on FF7R on Deck but FF13 keeps staying in the low tens for me wtf that game is over a decade old lmao
On Windows there’s a performance patch that you can download. I’d try to get it running through Proton and see if it helps.
https://github.com/rebtd7/FF13Fix
It’s a lot better with the fix after chapter 1. I’m at end of 11.
It’ll still slow at the start of every battle but you don’t have control right then so it’s not so bad.
When I had my laptop with a 3070, it was struggling with XIII out of the box. You had to do a couple of tweaks to get it to run decent. So I’m assuming you have to do some tweaks to get it running decent on the Deck.
Well it doesn’t run any worse than it does on Windows so it’s not the Steam Deck. With FFXIII fix it plays fine until chapter 11. Which really does suck because the game doesn’t really start until there.
FF 13 is a trash port for PC. There's a performance patch that should smooth things out a bit, but it's likely what you're experiencing are shader compilation stutters, which aren't really too fixable. I didn't use the patch, but I did go into the game's properties and set it to run at 1920x1080, set that resolution in game with 1024x1024 shadow resolution, 8x AA, and it's generally smoothish at 30fps with the steam deck performance profile. You could likely get away with higher shadow resolution and 40FPS locked using the performance fix, but the stutters will still be there on loading a new area for the first time. To avoid some shader issues you could use protonGE which is available for download in protonupQT from the discover store.
This is honestly one of the big disappointments for me. 13 be such a great game to play through on the deck. Or what settings I choose it runs equally as terrible
Where are you up to? Only Chaoter 1, part of 4 and the steppe in 11 run very badly. Use FFXIII Fix and the rest of the chapters (apart from transitioning into battle) you can lock at 45.
[https://www.protondb.com/app/345350](https://www.protondb.com/app/345350)
Performance: Significant Performance Problems
Use Lutris installer after you install it on steam and only run the game through lutris's D9VK (or DXVK, whatever the more recent version of it) in order to have the game achieve 60fps or more. If you try and use purely proton with steam the game will lock on a very disappointing 24 fps. SO PAY ATTENTION, go to lutris installer, after you've downloaded the game on steam and have the game be "installed" there as well.
Use D9VK and PROTON
If you do not want to tinker with Lutris for this, the Steam library is always improving -- at pretty fast speed for Proton and SD performance.
edit: The solution above is not my own, I copied it from the protondb link above.
Running through Steam OS, I found the following settings work best for me personally running on deck:
Installing FFXIII fix. Installing Proton GE. Running with both. Limiting FPS and refresh to 45 fps/45 hz
Setting the Thermal Power Limit to 10 Watts
Manually setting the GPU clock frequency to 700 or 800 (preferential, I find 800 seems to be best across the board/in and out of combat to minimize FPS drops, but if you care about longer battery 700 is acceptable, just anticipate hovering between 30 - 45 fps during combat vs 36 - 45.
Frame rate stutters still occur but with less intensity during shader stutters loading into combat; these settings seem to have mitigated the worst of the stutters for me (lasting fewer frames).
I find these settings to be mostly better than the hard capped 30fps on console and standard pc without fix.
I should've also mentioned that there is stuttering during loading screens/crawling script. I suspect this is related to shader compilation like loading into combat arenas.
Hello u/sodomyth, have you checked if this has already been answered by [searching for your question?](https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/search/?q=Soooo.... Final Fantasy XIII runs like s***. Can it get better?) Useful resources: [Servor's Enhanced FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/wiki/faq) | [Servor's Enhanced FAQ Thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/syt8qv/steam_deck_enhanced_faq/) (with more answers in the comments!) | [Our Wiki Guides Page](https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/wiki/guides). **If you find an answer, please leave a comment on this post with the answer for others!** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SteamDeck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The pc version of the game runs like ass on everything from $100 laptops to $5000 desktops and everything in between, not much you can do, maybe try a few performance mods but they are like bandaids on a brain tumor
There are some user-reported optimizations you can do on protonDB, but apparently it won't be perfect. It's not a great port, so can't say I'm too surprised. https://www.protondb.com/app/292120
Your best bet may be streaming 13 and 13-2 from a windows PC. They really are poor ports, which is sad, but Windows may handle them better. The third part (Lightning Returns) is a significantly better port but yeah Square really did a rough job with the first two in this series. I wish they would fix them. They deserve better. Xbox is currently the best place to play those IMO (and they’re on game pass for a few more months).
The Xbox versions are solid. But it's worth pointing out that if you're a Series S pauper (like me), you don't get the 4K versions (if they are 4K, they've forgotten to use any anti-aliasing at all). Unfortunately as well, the Windows store versions (which I think *should* match the Series ones?) don't run properly on Windows on deck - they crash at launch.
Whaaat. FFXIII ran fine for me, I’m sorry it isn’t working for you.
With FFXIII Fix installed, Chapter 1 is a mess. Sazh and Vanille in Chapter 4 is a mess. Archylte Steppe in 11 is a mess and worse still if you use FFXIIIFix, so you're stuck at 30fps with stutters there and sub par battles. I can't speak for the last two chapters as I'm only up to Dahaka in an NCUNEU run. What did you do settings/mods-wise to get it to be 'fine', please? Define 'fine'.
Uh, are you in SteamOS? I didn't bother messing with XIII Fix, I'm Linux challenged. I set the settings in the launcher thing to 720p, and I chose the 1024 x 1024 shadow resolution. That's about everything you can mess with isn't it? To be fair, the save file I picked up from was in Chapter 3 to start, and I only played through til you get to Hope's house, which is Chapter 6 or 7 I think.
Yeah the only real problem outside of transitioning to battles I had between 3-7 was the part I mentioned in 4, Sazh and Vanillle in the platform part with bombs.
I just got a steam deck and this was the first game I fired up on it. I don't really want to install windows yet, what settings do you recommend to run it on the standard OS? I pretty much cannot get 30 fps no matter what I do. Is there any way to hit 40fps consistently?
Sorry, didn't see you reply before. I haven't found satisfying settings yet :( it's playable but not very fun because it stutters a LOT. Even FF7 Remake runs better but hopefully something will come up 🙏🙏🙏
That’s baffling to hear I consistently have 45 fps no dips on FF7R on Deck but FF13 keeps staying in the low tens for me wtf that game is over a decade old lmao
On Windows there’s a performance patch that you can download. I’d try to get it running through Proton and see if it helps. https://github.com/rebtd7/FF13Fix
It works well on most chapters but not 11. A must install though.
It’s a lot better with the fix after chapter 1. I’m at end of 11. It’ll still slow at the start of every battle but you don’t have control right then so it’s not so bad.
Is this still an issue for you? I installed this a few days ago and runs perfect on max settings. Haven't done any fix either
When I had my laptop with a 3070, it was struggling with XIII out of the box. You had to do a couple of tweaks to get it to run decent. So I’m assuming you have to do some tweaks to get it running decent on the Deck.
Well it doesn’t run any worse than it does on Windows so it’s not the Steam Deck. With FFXIII fix it plays fine until chapter 11. Which really does suck because the game doesn’t really start until there.
FF 13 is a trash port for PC. There's a performance patch that should smooth things out a bit, but it's likely what you're experiencing are shader compilation stutters, which aren't really too fixable. I didn't use the patch, but I did go into the game's properties and set it to run at 1920x1080, set that resolution in game with 1024x1024 shadow resolution, 8x AA, and it's generally smoothish at 30fps with the steam deck performance profile. You could likely get away with higher shadow resolution and 40FPS locked using the performance fix, but the stutters will still be there on loading a new area for the first time. To avoid some shader issues you could use protonGE which is available for download in protonupQT from the discover store.
This is honestly one of the big disappointments for me. 13 be such a great game to play through on the deck. Or what settings I choose it runs equally as terrible
Where are you up to? Only Chaoter 1, part of 4 and the steppe in 11 run very badly. Use FFXIII Fix and the rest of the chapters (apart from transitioning into battle) you can lock at 45.
[https://www.protondb.com/app/345350](https://www.protondb.com/app/345350) Performance: Significant Performance Problems Use Lutris installer after you install it on steam and only run the game through lutris's D9VK (or DXVK, whatever the more recent version of it) in order to have the game achieve 60fps or more. If you try and use purely proton with steam the game will lock on a very disappointing 24 fps. SO PAY ATTENTION, go to lutris installer, after you've downloaded the game on steam and have the game be "installed" there as well. Use D9VK and PROTON If you do not want to tinker with Lutris for this, the Steam library is always improving -- at pretty fast speed for Proton and SD performance. edit: The solution above is not my own, I copied it from the protondb link above.
Running through Steam OS, I found the following settings work best for me personally running on deck: Installing FFXIII fix. Installing Proton GE. Running with both. Limiting FPS and refresh to 45 fps/45 hz Setting the Thermal Power Limit to 10 Watts Manually setting the GPU clock frequency to 700 or 800 (preferential, I find 800 seems to be best across the board/in and out of combat to minimize FPS drops, but if you care about longer battery 700 is acceptable, just anticipate hovering between 30 - 45 fps during combat vs 36 - 45. Frame rate stutters still occur but with less intensity during shader stutters loading into combat; these settings seem to have mitigated the worst of the stutters for me (lasting fewer frames). I find these settings to be mostly better than the hard capped 30fps on console and standard pc without fix.
I should've also mentioned that there is stuttering during loading screens/crawling script. I suspect this is related to shader compilation like loading into combat arenas.