Techland’s Dying Light 2 was definitely one of the better game releases of the recent time. Since I loved the Parkour and gritty world of the first game, the sequel checked all boxes for me and even managed to surprise with great new stuff. That being said, even utilizing AMD’s Fidelity Super Resolution 1.0 and the lowest visual settings, that particular open world zombie rpg parkour game gave you a pretty hard time on the Steam Deck. At least until now.

 

FSR 2.0 - a Dream becomes true

 

With their first Community Update Techland now added some of the most wanted features to the game - including FSR 2.0. AMD’s open-source equivalent to Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling - short DLSS - is not a static upscaler like you had in the game or the Deck’s global settings available before. It dynamically adjusts parts of the game’s base resolution to its needs and upscales the content in a way that in some moments it nearly seems to be indistinguishable from output on native resolution. Long story short: Massive performance gain and more headroom to either achieve a better framerate or up some settings for a better overall quality.

 

Upon first start you’ll be met with pretty steep default settings which reflect the High preset. Already in the initial cutscene the Deck struggles massively with its performance budget due to vegetation, shadow details and many post-processing effects.

 

The Holy Grail - The Golden 40

 

Our Goal is to reach the Golden 40, you may ask why? Well, check my Video about the Golden 40. In this video I give you an extensive explanation on why 40 FPS at 40Hz will change your Steam Deck life - so give it a shot!

 

If you wanna see some visuell comparison between the old FSR 1.0 and and the new FSR 2.0 - check the video above!

In this video I will only compare the upscaling methods and their performance results on the official Medium preset, which reflects the settings most similar to my Golden 40 Preset. Today’s dish contains a wide range of upscaling settings - excluding DLSS. Linear upscaling, FSR 1.0 and FSR 2.0 - which got added with the recent Community Update.

 

Generally speaking it quickly get’s clear, that both Linear Upscaling and the old static FSR solution act pretty aggressively. Their performance presets ultimately result in a massive base resolution degradation, which is definitely not what we’re looking for. In stark contrast: Even FSR 2.0’s performance mode - with its preset aiming at the biggest overall resource savings due to a lowered resolution output - looks surprisingly better than the results we get with the Linear Upscaling and FSR 1.0 quality modes.

 

That being said, having a few things tweaked accordingly, to maintain a solid framerate of around 40FPS, the game is now more than playable on the Steam Deck - even outside of its framerate-tanking intro sequence and level. Small rare dips remain, no matter which settings you chose, which probably are the result of the geometry working its way through the game’s rendering processes and the occlusion culling deciding to rather opt for more resources than ending up too slow.

Golden 40 Settings

In-game:

Window Mode	Fullscreen
Display Resolution	1280x800
V-Sync	On
Upscale Method	FSR 2.0 Quality/Balanced
Renderer Mode	D3D11
Texture Quality	High

LOD Quality	Low
Anti Aliasing	Stable
Motion Blur Quality	Medium
Particles Quality	Medium
Screen Space Reflections	On

Sun Shadows Quality	Low
Contact Shadows Quality	Medium
Ambient Occlusion Quality	Medium
Global Illumination Quality	Low
Reflections Quality	Low

Fog Quality	Low
Postprocess Quality	Low

Quick Action Menu:

Use per-game profile	On
Framerate Limit	40
Refresh Rate	40
Allow Tearing	On
Half Rate Shading	Off
Thermal Power (TDP) Limit	Off