When we tested the God of War Ragnarok on our Steam Deck, we saw decent performance numbers. The game ran around 45 to 60 FPS with AMD FSR 3.1 (Balanced) and Frame Gen enabled. However, GoW Ragnarok has had issues with older AMD CPUs based on Zen 1 and Zen 2 architecture which caused performance hiccups in specific CPU-bounded areas.

Well, a new Patch 6 update has been released, and it is meant to fix this issue, assumedly bringing better performance for the Steam Deck which uses a Zen 2 processor.

What does the Patch 6 bring?

The Patch 6 is mostly focused on bug fixes and performance improvements. It also fixes crashes on Journal pages and different locations in Vanaheim. Furthermore, there has been a fix regarding audio dialogue, here is a list of all the changes:

• Fixed a crash in UI when opening certain Journal pages
• Fixed a crash that could happen when controllers get disabled or enabled in rapid succession
• Fixed a crash that would occur in various locations in Vanaheim
• Improved performance of AMD Zen1 and Zen2 processors in areas where the game was CPU-limited
• Increased tessellation in Realm Between Realms back to PS5 quality
• Note that the performance issue related to tessellation is resolved in NVIDIA drivers 565.90 or higher
• Fixed an issue where lock-on would rapidly bounce between targets when using the mouse. It will now be more “sticky” requiring more effort to change targets
• Fixed an issue where attack indicators would not look correct when using frame generation
• Fixed an issue where cinematic dialogue audio would be at a lower volume than intended

Is there any difference?

To check how much performance difference Patch 6 has made, we ran the game on our Steam Deck (LCD). For a quick test, we used the same settings as before – AMD FSR-FG (frame generation) on and scaled with the FSR 3.1 Balanced preset, with quality set to the low preset. This is what you can see in the screenshot below.

We didn’t notice any major performance improvements in the areas we played through, though these optimizations simply may not affect exactly what we tested, the patch note does reference “CPU-limited” areas after all.

However, Youtuber Deck Wizard is getting over 60 FPS in his gameplay with Frame Gen on and FSR 3.1 set to Balanced. The same Youtuber also tested the game a month ago across different presets, and he was getting 50ish FPS using the Balanced preset, depending on the area. This means that you may now get 5 to 10 frames more than before.

Further testing on our Steam Deck (after charging it back up) demonstrated that frame generation didn’t seem to make a massive difference at all, and toggling it off actually made performance noticeably less stuttery in any area we tested. So, moving forward we’d recommend trying out the settings below. For us, this delivered the smoothest experience so far and consistently held around the 60 FPS mark.

However, since other people’s test results seem to vary, we’d recommend toggling between frame gen on/off and see which setting works best for you.

About the Author

Sameed Hussain

Sameed is a writer specializing is tech & hardware.