Find out whether Starfield will be available on either handheld console at launch
Wondering whether you’ll be able to play Starfield on the Steam Deck or the ASUS ROG Ally?One might think that a gargatuanRPGlikeStarfieldwould be a tall order for handheld consoles to run, but we’ve seen the Steam Deck play mammoths likeElden Ringlast year. And the ASUS ROG Ally’s specs are more impressive still. The performance is never going to match what you can enjoy with a high-end gaming PC, of course, but if buttery smooth performance isn’t a necessity for you, then handheld may be a good way to go!
In this guide we’ll explore the system specs of both the Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally, and answer the question of whetherStarfieldwill run effectively on either of these popular PC-adjacent consoles when it releases this September.
Will Starfield run on Steam Deck?
There is not yet an official stance on whether Starfield will be Steam Deck compatible. But based on what we’ve seen so far, it seems likely that Starfield will run on Steam Deck - but it might not run terriblywell.
On the plus side, the Steam Deck only needs to run Starfield at its native resolution of 1280x800, and it’s likely that Bethesda are working on optimising Starfield specifically for the Steam Deck. Starfield is confirmed to support FSR 2.0, AMD’s upscaling technology, which will likely be necessary to achieve decent performance on the Deck. But, to put it kindly, Bethesda have never been very good at releasing well-optimised games with stable performance across a wide range of devices.
Our educated guess is that Starfield will almost certainly be playable on Steam Deck, but it will be far from the smoothest experience you can have with the game. But perhaps Bethesda will surprise us!
The ASUS ROG Ally is the Steam Deck’s superior in almost every way when it comes to specs, and so you’ll have a better chance of running Starfield on the ASUS ROG Ally at a decent frame rate (read: 30 fps or higher). However, these specs may still fall a bit short of the minimum specs listed on Steam in some areas.
The Ally’s GPU is roughly equivalent to a GeForce GTX 1060 or 1650, which is definitely a step up from the Steam Deck’s GPU but still not quite at the same level as the minimum requirement of a 1070 Ti. The CPU is a different story however, with the Ally’s AMD processor exceeding the capabilities of the recommended Ryzen 5 3600X or Intel i5-10600K. And the memory and storage capabilities of the Ally are well up to the task of handling Starfield’s immense cosmic bulk.
