Elden Ring on Steam Deck: Handheld beats PS5 in loading time comparison

Valve’s handheld Steam Deck is now available and allows playing high-quality triple-A PC titles on the go. A new example of how well the device does technically is shown by FromSoftware’s latest Soulsike action RPG Elden Ring.

Elden Ring on the Steam Deck loads faster than on PS5

It should be obvious to everyone that the action RPG masterpiece Elden Ring cannot have the same graphics quality or performance on Valve’s handheld Steam Deck as it does on a classic PC or the current PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles. And yet, the handheld is ahead in some areas, as a graphics and performance comparison by YouTuber ElAnalistaDeBits proves.

He compared the graphics, performance and load times of Elden Ring on all platforms and came to a remarkable result. Surprisingly, the Valve handheld even has the lead in loading times. Around 6 seconds (5.73 seconds) pass before the Steam deck loads into the game. At least about one second less than on the PlayStation 5 (6.56 seconds) and a whole 17 seconds less than on the PS4 (23.23 seconds).

Elden Ring on the Steam Deck

Elden Ring also cuts a good figure technically on the Steam Deck. The open-word game flickers across the screen in 800p resolution (1280 x 800 pixels) and an almost constant 30 frames per second.

For comparison: On the PS4, Elden Ring offers 30 FPS in Full HD, on PS5 and Xbox Series X there is a choice between native 4K with 30 FPS or a dynamic resolution with 60 FPS in performance mode.

The level of detail of Elden Ring on the Steam Deck largely corresponds to the high settings of the PC version, which means that the title cuts a good figure on the handheld’s 7-inch display. Especially the maximum visibility, the level of detail of the vegetation and the quality of the shadows match the high PC settings, but the general texture quality and resolution have to be reduced.

Nevertheless, the result is more than impressive and once again shows that Valve’s Steam Deck is currently the most powerful handheld on the market. The Steam Deck is equipped with an AMD Zen 2 CPU, an RDNA2 GPU with 1.6 TFlops and 16 GB LPDDR5 memory.