Assassin's Creed Shadows out now - Steam Deck Verified but has NVIDIA problems on Desktop Linux

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is out now and it's Steam Deck Verified, so I took a look to see if it deserves the rating. The good news is that it will also work on normal Desktop Linux with AMD GPUs but NVIDIA GPUs have problems.

There's a Proton bug report open for NVIDIA owners, with it noting the game freezes before accessing the main menu. A possible workaround is to use the NVIDIA Developer Beta Driver 570.123.06, which may have a fix. That's not a normal driver though. According to the developer of VKD3D-Proton it's a known driver bug and there's another workaround in the link.

Steam Deck

As for Steam Deck, I was really interested to see if it actually truly deserved being Steam Deck Verified. This testing was done on the Steam Deck LCD 512GB model. For verification currently it appears Valve used Proton Experimental.

I will take this initial time to complain about one thing first though, and you likely already know what — extra launchers and logins. It's plain and simply annoying downloading a game, getting excited and ready to play to then having to login to an extra launcher for single-player.

That said, it all worked fine.

With the interface, it's mostly great. Ubisoft have some nice settings you can tweak, with it defaulting to large sizes for text and icons. However, when it shows up some icons on-screen like initial tutorial bits telling you specific buttons, the icons are tiny and very unclear. Apart from that though, I have no problems with the interface, it fits nicely.

For the Steam Deck, Ubisoft have locked away most graphical settings but they have left in upscaling settings and frame generation. The default settings use TAA, with the option of AMD FSR and Intel XeSS available. For these default settings the game (so far) appears to hover close to 30FPS, although it will repeatedly drop below it. Even so, it feels smooth and most importantly enjoyable on the defaults.

Testing between the different upscalers. I barely saw any difference in performance between TAA, FSR and XeSS. TAA actually looks better than the others, so this might be a rare case where sticking with the actual defaults is just — fine.

Don't bother with Frame Generation though, as with most heavy titles on Steam Deck, it absolutely destroys the Frame Timing making it quite a mess. It doesn't even really improve FPS here, just ruins Frame Timing making it feel awful. The Steam Deck simply doesn't have the performance needed to make Frame Generation work for most titles.

As long as you keep expectations in check and don't expect to see 60FPS, you're quite likely to have a good time with Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Steam Deck. At least from my so far cursory check (I need to see more of the game), it's surprisingly good on Steam Deck and seems like it holds up pretty nicely. You have to remember most normal people are not playing with an FPS counter up, they won't even notice the small momentary drops. In the open world it really holds up nicely, just some bigger more intense fights with lots going on can bring some dips. About what you would expected for a game as big as this.

I have to say it looks quite gorgeous on the Steam Deck screen too. I think Ubisoft did actually a good job on the details here, even when it's clearly running on lower settings with upscalers on a lower resolution. There are some really minor upscaler artifacts when you look very close, but not noticeable when you're just playing it. It actually looks far better than the screenshots show.

For battery life, tested on the Steam Deck LCD, you're not going to get much above 1 hour. It really does drain it quickly there. So you're going to want a charger or battery pack readily available for this one.

Ubisoft said they will be looking into providing further graphics options on Steam Deck in future updates.

For those of you who do want to tweak more settings, sadly the usual method of setting the "SteamDeck=0 %command%" launch option doesn't work here. So they're doing something different to detect the Steam Deck compared with other games.

Offline Play?

If you're also curious about offline play with no internet connection, I tested that too. When disabling WiFi, sadly, it doesn't appear to work. Ubisoft Connect will repeatedly tell you "connection lost", and clicking "Go offline" in the launcher doesn't seem to do anything and it just repeats. Their "Go offline" button appears pointless. So based on that, it's only portable if you have a connection, which is another mark against these ridiculous launchers. This is not mentioned on Valve's verification notice, which it should be.

The above point contradicts what they said before release on X/Twitter. I tested it on Desktop Linux too, and it doesn't launch without an active internet connection.

Desktop Linux

As for Desktop Linux, at least with AMD GPUs, the experience there should be pretty great overall. Naturally much better performance than the Steam Deck. However, it does have an initial notice stating it's been installed on a HDD instead of an SSD but that can be safely ignored. Hopefully Valve can find a fix in Proton to stop this notice appearing.

Performance is generally about where I expected it to be on my Kubuntu Linux desktop running an AMD Ryzen 5800X and Radeon 6800 XT at 2560x1440 resolution. By default it set me to the High preset at 60FPS which did feel pretty great, but tweaking it a bit you can get it running much better with only minimal changes.

Setting it to AMD FSR Quality + Frame Generation, enabled me to see a lot of it around 100FPS and it still does look incredible.

An issue that I have seen across both Steam Deck and Desktop Linux, is that the game will not always quit properly, so you may have to force-quit it.

For the Steam launch as a whole it arrives with Steam Achievements, Trading Cards, Badges, Emoticons and Profile Background Images. Nice to see a proper release. Nice to see another big release working so well on Linux systems, at least if you're on an AMD GPU.