Steam Deck

Atomic Heart Best Steam Deck Settings

Immerse yourself in this unique Cold War adventure with these Steam Deck settings.

Atomic Heart is a first-person adventure filled with nightmarish creatures, futuristic technologies, and a twisted Soviet-era world waiting to be unraveled. It's also Steam Deck Verified! Immerse yourself in this one-of-a-kind shooter experience with the best Steam Deck Settings for Atomic Heart.

Atomic Heart Best Steam Deck Settings

Compatibility Settings
Proton VersionDefault
BIOS Settings
UMA Frame Buffer Size4G
CryoUtilities Settings
Swap File Size16GB*
Swappiness1
*Set to as large as your Steam Deck will allow

Atomic Heart is Steam Deck Verified and runs fine without any tweaking. You may get a more stable performance by increasing your Deck's UMA Frame Buffer Size to 4GB and using CryoByte33's excellent CryoUtilities to increase the Swap File Size.

For best results, install Atomic Hearts onto your internal drive. The game spends a lot of time reading from the drive and this reduces or eliminates most stuttering related to disk reads.

One issue that hasn't disappeared is the font size and readability. The game still uses ridiculously small fonts, so you might need to put on your reading glasses to catch all the prompts.

Balanced Settings (Native@40fps | ~1h45m)

Atomic Heart suffered a few performance issues at launch, but subsequent updates have greatly improved the gaming experience on the Steam Deck. Indoors you can get a full, stable 60 frames per second, but once you step outside, the framerate drops to around 40fps. We've opted for stability over sheer performance, so this configuration caps the framerate at 40fps using Steam's Gamescope menu.

If you really want that stable 60fps, consider reducing the graphics preset to Low, dropping the resolution, and using FSR. Keep in mind that the FSR implementation in Atomic Heart introduces a lot of artifacts and extreme blurriness, which affects readability and playability. We don't recommend it.

In-game Quality Settings
PresetHigh
Depth of FieldHigh
Motion BlurOff
Anti-aliasingHigh TAA
DLSS Frame GenerationOff
FidelityFX Super ResolutionQuality
Animation QualityMax
ShadowsHigh
Ambient OcclusionHigh
Visual FXHigh
Number of ObjectsHigh
MaterialsHigh
Volumetric FogHigh
PostprocessingHigh
TexturesHigh
Texture Anisotropy4
3D Model QualityHigh
Vegetation DensityHigh
Hard Drive SpeedSSD
Shader CacheOn
Steam Deck Performance Menu Settings
Refresh Rate40
Framerate Limit40
Allow TearingOff
Half Rate ShadingOff
Thermal Power (TDP) LimitOff
Manual GPU Clock ControlOff
Scaling FilterLinear