Inside A Simulated Steam Machine: 27 Games Tell The Real Story

For this next set of games, we're focusing on the newest and most demanding titles in our test suite. Armored Core VI is the first game, simply because it starts with "A".

AAA Gaming On The Simulated Steam Machine

We tested From Software's mecha epic at "High" settings because moving up to "Maximum" provides an imperceptible visual benefit. This title establishes a pattern you'll see continue through many other games in our tests, where 1080p puts you in the 90 FPS region, 1440p drops you closer to 60 FPS, and 4K runs at around 30 FPS. 4K is playable in this title on our system, but it may struggle more on the slightly neutered GPU in the real Steam Machine. AC6 doesn't support upscaling, but you can set the resolution to whatever you want and SteamOS' gaming mode will scale it to your output resolution, which is quite handy.


Baldur's Gate III is one of a few games that we tested that has a native Linux client. Now, the BG3 Linux client is specifically intended for the Steam Deck and defaults to very low settings, but it doesn't lock you out of using higher settings if you want. We went straight to 4K and "High" settings and it was pretty marginal, so we enabled FSR2 at "Quality" and got a very playable 45 to 50 FPS. Things might change once you get to Act 3; unfortunately our test system didn't have our save game so we couldn't test Act 3. We expect it will play well enough, though, and you can drop settings down to Medium if it's really necessary. This game doesn't exactly need a sky-high frame rate to be playable.


We didn't expect much out of Black Myth: Wukong because it's an unbelievably demanding game that heavily favors NVIDIA GPUs. Imagine our surprise when we booted the game up and it defaulted to High settings at 4K on our GPU (albeit with 33% resolution scaling). We YOLO'd the benchmark, and what would you know, it came up roses at about 60 FPS. Swapping to XeSS does hurt performance to the tune of around 10 FPS in 4K, but we think the extra visual stability is worth it—even if there are still some artifacts visible, like on flowing water. Ultimately your performance in this game, like most others, is going to come down to how much upscaling you're willing to use.


Everyone's favorite benchmark, Cyberpunk 2077, gave us a lot of trouble at first. For whatever reason, messing with the RT settings in this game on Linux is very buggy; settings seem to apply inconsistently, and performance is generally poor. As such, you'll have to stay away from ray-tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 despite that the GPU hardware is perfectly capable. There's not enough video RAM anyway, at least at QHD and 4K. If you stick to the standard "High" raster settings, you can have a great experience, and it's fully possible to play in 4K with XeSS if you like. It looks pretty darn good in this game too.


Elden Ring: Nightreign uses the same game engine as Armored Core VI, although it's hard capped at 60 FPS in this case. This number is very easy to reach in 1080p and QHD; you can even run maximum settings if you want, although you'll see some dips in QHD. The "Maximum" settings preset has more visual impact in this game than in Armored Core. In 4K, you'll need to stick to High settings (most noticeably reducing grass render distance), but it's playable this way; it only runs at 30 FPS on the PS4, so it's a similar experience to that—just at drastically higher resolution.


Hogwarts Legacy got a massive patch in January of this year that added modding support and also implemented a tremendous optimization pass. The game was incredibly demanding at launch, and it has calmed down quite a lot in that regard by this point. You can easily hit well over 60 FPS in 1080p, and hitting 60 FPS in 1440p isn't hard at all. However, 4K is still challenging; we had to use a healthy amount of XeSS to pull out a playable frame rate in this surprisingly fast-paced action game. Just like with Cyberpunk 2077, ray-tracing is problematic; it's disappointing considering how much it improves the look of this game in particular, but it's just a no-go at this point. In our testing, playing with ray-tracing caused GPU driver crashes, which are a real downer in the middle of a time-constrained gaming session.


Possibly the most notorious game we tested for performance problems, Monster Hunter Wilds is completely playable on our simulated Steam Machine, even in 4K resolution. We did have to drop settings as far as "Medium", and make use of XeSS in "Performance" mode, though, and the visuals are pretty grimy as a result. In lower resolutions it's not such a problem; this game scales video RAM usage very poorly with resolution increases. Notably, where this game is a stuttery mess on Windows 11, in Linux it was perfectly smooth, which was impressive. You can probably kick it up to High settings in 1080p.


While it's a bit older by this point, Red Dead Redemption 2 can still put a hurting on a system. We tested it by mostly using the settings it defaulted to, with the graphical detail slider set to the middle "Balanced" position, and then enabling a 75% (3/4) render scale in the advanced graphical options for 4K mode. That's not necessary at 1440p or 1080p; you also probably could get away with raising the graphical detail slider, too. It's crazy how good this game still looks considering its age.


In Street Fighter 6's World Tour mode, we encountered some bugginess with the settings. Changing the game over to Proton Experimental seems to have cleaned that up. The title defaulted to High settings and we left it at that, but changed the resolution to 4K. This was pretty chuggy, so we cranked the render resolution slider all the way down to 2/5. Despite what that sounds like, it's nowhere near a 40% resolution scale; we reckon it's more like 60% resolution, similar to the "Balanced" preset on typical upscalers. It still looks pretty good and is fully playable, even in battles with dozens of NPCs standing around. Lower resolutions will have no trouble.

Just a few more native PC titles, and then we're going to look at some emulator games before giving you our initial thoughts...