Dune: Awakening looks like it may be playable on Steam Deck - benchmark tested

Dune: Awakening is releasing May 20th from Funcom, and surprisingly it looks like it may actually be playable on the Steam Deck. That is, unless Funcom decide to put in some anti-cheat that blocks Linux. There's currently no anti-cheat mentioned on the Steam page. I did email Funcom about any anti-cheat, and they haven't yet replied.

A benchmark mode has been made available for the upcoming MMO, so I gave it a test-run on an LCD Steam Deck to see how it went and the results actually surprised me. As long as you're not expecting a constant 60FPS and don't mind running on low details, you might be okay here.

First up testing on Low with FSR3 set to Ultra Performance resulted in all sections giving above 50FPS on average:

Changing over FSR3 to Performance still gave over 40FPS on average in all sections:

Also see how it went when setting FSR3 to Balanced. It's still getting averages above 40FPS in all parts:

The real concern are the minimums though, which in all cases shows drops below 30FPS. It just depends how often it will dip in the full game.

I wouldn't recommend Frame Generation either. For a lot of games on Steam Deck it will bring up the overall FPS, but it destroys the Frame Timings making it a mess. Frame Generation is generally only good if the game is already able to perform to at least 60FPS.

If you actually locked it down to 30FPS, this might actually give a reasonable experience if you're wanting to play the brand new MMO on Steam Deck when it releases. It remains to be seen how the rest of the game fares though but this is at least somewhat promising from the benchmark.