Atomfall releases today (March 27th), though the game has been available a few days early to users who bought the Deluxe Edition. It has launched with plenty of positive reviews and already holds a Very Positive rating on Steam across hundreds of early access reviews. If you’re looking to pick it up now that the full release has arrived, Steam Deck owners will be glad to know that it runs incredibly well on the popular Valve handheld. In fact, it even runs well at max settings on a 7-year-old GPU.

The game has already been Steam Deck Verified, but we thought we’d give it a go on our Deck and see how the performance holds up across various settings. We’ve put Atomfall to the test in Low, Medium, and Ultra presets – here are the results.

We tested Atomfall on our Steam Deck

Looking at early performance benchmarks for the game, we had a pretty good idea that it would run just fine, but it has exceeded our expectations. Yes, the game is Verified by Valve, but that doesn’t always guarantee the level of performance we see here. For example, we tested ‘verified’ Assassin’s Creed Shadows on our Steam Deck, but Atomfall feels much more optimized right out the gate.

It’s safe to say that Atomfall offers excellent performance on the Steam Deck. Even on the medium preset, we could enjoy triple figures, though this was within smaller, enclosed environments. The performance suffers more once you get out into an open environment, but even still, we managed around 60 FPS, which is more than we’ve come to expect on the Steam Deck these days.

On low, we enjoyed framerates comfortably above the target 60 FPS, making it possible to more reliably match the 90Hz refresh rate on the OLED model; we are using a standard LCD Deck for reference.

Atomfall is a great-looking game, but it doesn’t feel like the performance tanks because of this. For Steam Deck owners who are looking for a new game to jump into without fear of choppy performance, Atomfall could be it. Set without a quarantine zone in the North of England, it is an action-adventure with a lot of emphasis on mystery, scavenging, and varied combat.

You could argue that the Steam Deck is becoming outdated as more demanding AAA titles hit the market, especially with more reliance on ray-traced visuals. However, Atomfall isn’t one of these. Looking in the completely other direction, the game can even run at 8K native (with an RTX 5090), so it is safe to say that optimization beats many other modern games of this scale.

About the Author

Charlie Noon

Charlie is the Affiliate manager for PC Guide. He has a vast understanding of most PC hardware and consumer essentials, using his knowledge to provide the best products and the biggest deals.