Sony‘s new strategy is to bring the games that they have exclusive for PS5 and PS4 to PC. This idea seems positive, but the complaints regarding the importation of games from the company’s consoles to PCs multiply. Several users now point out that the game Horizon Zero Dawn does not work on the Steam Deck.
The Horizon Zero Dawn game was released in August 2020 as an exclusive for the PS4. Sony has decided to bring the game to PC, as well as other important titles from the company. It seems that this strategy is not liked, since the games would not be optimizing correctly.
Horizon Zero Dawn doesn’t work on Valve’s console
In case you don’t know the game, this is a third-person action-exploration game set in an apocalyptic future. Humanity has suffered an important technological regression that has returned them to the stone age and, in addition, they are divided into tribes. Aloy, who is the protagonist, is a skilled hunter who seeks to unravel the past, while surviving very intelligent robotic creatures with a lot of bad blood.
It has a big problem that can be seen in the minimum requirements of the game. An NVIDIA GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 290 is required to play at 1080p with graphics settings. Some requirements that make it impossible for Horizon Zero Dawn to be played on the Steam Deck.
Valve’s console is based on a partially customized AMD Ryzen APU . The main problem is that the graphics it includes is not very powerful, so it does not reach what is necessary to run the game in 1080p. According to the specifications of the official website of the Steam Deck , the graphics card has an approximate power of 1.6 FLOPs , while the graphics indicated by Sony as a minimum, are around 4.5 TFLOPs.
As we can see the difference is, more or less, three times. This makes the game unplayable on this console . Something that, by the way, will happen with many other games due to the low power of the Valve console. It is also true that portable consoles, such as the Nintendo Switch, are very limited, since they cannot have powerful processors.
Playing it at 540p doesn’t seem like a solution
There are several users who have highlighted that they have been able to run Horizon Zero Dawn on the Steam Deck. The problem is that for this they have had to reduce the resolution to the beast. They have had to go to 540p resolution, which is half that of 1080p resolution. This adjustment has required other important graphic adjustments.
There is not much more to do in this case, since the AMD Ryzen APU gives what it gives. It’s also true that the Steam Deck is possibly not meant to run such powerful games. From our point of view, you have to be much more conservative, opting for light games and indie titles, above all.
How about Valve’s Steam Deck not being able to run Horizon Zero Dawn?
