Can Steam Deck run UE5.1 Lumen/Nanite in Fortnite? (Patreon)

In the latest DF Direct Weekly, we talked about Valve's decision to stick with the current performance level of Steam Deck for any potential successor, concentrating on improved battery life and a better screen instead - a strategy we broadly thought to be a good idea. Playing Devil's Advocate, I (Rich) wondered whether the Deck could run UE5 titles bearing in mind how poor prior demos had been running on the system owing mostly to the CPU overhead. The question is, now we have a shipping game using Lumen/Nanite, can it run on Steam Deck - and run well enough?

To test, you need to have Windows installed. You also need to ignore the nag message telling you that the AMD driver is out-of-date and not very good. Then you can begin. I'm kinda guessing Series S-equivalent settings here (I'll confer with Alex about this tomorrow) but you can run software Lumen, Nanite and you don't need to be on ultra low settings to get 30fps. Limitations? The 30fps cap is bad with inconsistent frame-pacing (unlocking, you get to around 35fps on average) and traversal at speed causes some stutter.

Even so, I was pleasantly surprised about this - I didn't even need to push TSR to very low, unholy native resolutions - and will think about doing some #content on this as I expect the only other capture I would need would be Series S? Let me know if you'd like to see a short video on this!