Counter Strike 2 is surprisingly awful on Steam Deck right now

Whereas Counter-Strike 2 will rightly cater to aggressive gamers on PCs and laptops as a precedence, it appears these seeking to play an informal recreation on the Steam Deck are surprisingly out of luck in the meanwhile. Regardless of Valve having its palms within the improvement of each the sport and handheld, CS2 merely isn’t in a suitable state on the Deck proper now.

Trying on the recreation’s retailer web page, all appears effectively relating to CS2 Steam Deck compatibility. Nonetheless, we consider this can be an oversight following the transition from CS:GO to Counter-Strike 2, as our testing signifies this isn’t actually the case.

Leaping right into a recreation of Deathmatch on Mud 2, it doesn’t take lengthy for issues to come up. The primary shot I take it with my MAG-7 freezes the sport momentarily for about three seconds, as CS2 scrambles to compile the shaders essential for it. Whereas this doesn’t occur once more with the shotgun, this habits rears its ugly head with each weapon I fireplace for the primary time.

To make issues worse, efficiency is in no way the place it needs to be, resulting from what I can solely describe as surprisingly terrible optimization. The Steam Deck pushes out 25-35fps at native 800p, utilizing the settings beneficial within the recreation’s menu. This isn’t as a result of the system doesn’t meet the CS2 system requirements, as consulting the PC’s built-in Efficiency Overlay reveals GPU utilization wobbling from 50-70%.

I’m shocked to see CS2 launch within the state that it has on Steam Deck, given Valve’s in any other case nice observe file at supporting its personal library on the system. That stated, I’ve little doubt that the corporate will deal with these points promptly, because it’s already deployed some fixes based on Valve coder Pierre-Loup Griffais.

As soon as these issues are ironed out, we’ll possible see Counter-Strike 2 be part of the ranks of the best Steam Deck games as one other FPS feather within the system’s cap. For now, although, there’s clearly work to be achieved.