Is Helldivers 2 Steam Deck compatible? If you’re keen to take on hordes of terminids while also spreading democracy, Helldivers 2 is the game for you. If you’d like to complete this game on your Steam Deck, the experience has finally been adjusted to make it playable, but performance is still far off from where we would like it to be.
With the Helldivers 2 system requirements asking for just over 70GB of storage, you may want to consider investing in one of the best microSD cards for the Steam Deck to avoid any awkward clashes.
Is Helldivers 2 Steam Deck compatible?
Helldivers 2 is currently rated playable by Valve for Steam Deck. Previous issues with anti-cheat and general server capacity issues are now resolved.
Helldivers 2 doesn’t currently qualify for a verified rating due to some adjustments that are needed for the graphical settings, and because some in-game text may be hard to read.
The original Helldivers also holds a playable rating for the Steam Deck, but this is only down to the game sometimes showing non-Steam Deck icons.
Best Helldivers 2 settings for Steam Deck
After a few hours spent tinkering with the in-game settings, here is what we believe the best Helldivers 2 settings for Steam Deck are:
- Motion Blur: Off
- Depth of Field: Off
- Bloom: Off
- Sharpness: .75
- Texture Quality: Medium
- Object Detail Quality: Low
- Render Distance: Low
- Shadow Quality: Lowest
- Particle Quality: Lowest
- Reflection Quality: Lowest
- Space Quality: Low
- Ambient Occlusion: Off
- Screen Space Global Illumination: Off
- Vegetation and Rubble Density: Low
- Volumetric Fog Quality: Low
- Volumetric Cloud Quality: Low
- Anti-Aliasing: Off
- Render Scale: Quality
With the above settings, we’re able to get quite a consistent 45fps outside of combat, with frequent drops to the 30fps mark when the action on screen gets hectic. While there is a render scale option, AMD FSR isn’t included, and neither is Nvidia DLSS for desktop players, meaning no AI upscaling is possible if your gaming PC is being pushed to its limits in the current version of the game.
It’s not a priority for the developers, and until it is added to the game, the Steam Deck is far from the best way to play based on current performance unless you consider some performance mods.
The GPU and CPU usage during gameplay sat at around 98% and 87% respectively, while the power draw was also high at a consistent 22w. Of the 16GB VRAM on the Steam Deck, over 10GB was in use at all times, further cementing how demanding Helldivers 2 is to run on the Deck, at its lowest settings without a technology like AMD FSR available.
If you’re looking for inspiration, check out the best Steam Deck games we’ve played so far, with each game earning Valve’s highest possible ratings.