Steam Deck

Stray Best Steam Deck Settings

See a neon-lit cybercity from a fluffball's perspective with our guide to optimizing Stray's settings on your Steam Deck.

Step into a beautifully dystopian world in Stray, the immersive adventure game where you navigate a futuristic city as a lost cat. In this guide, we'll unlock the secrets to optimizing your Steam Deck settings for Stray for great gaming at your fingertips.

Stray Best Steam Deck Settings

Compatibility Settings
Proton Version Default
BIOS Settings
UMA Frame Buffer Size 4G

Stray works great out of the box. No pre-launch tinkering necessary! However, as always, when playing newer games I recommend increasing the UMA Frame Buffer Size to 4G in the BIOS. This guarantees up to 4G of the system's shared RAM goes to the GPU, which can help improve texture streaming in games with larger textures.

Balanced Settings (Native@40fps | ~2h30m)

My recommended settings try to strike a balance between graphics quality, performance, and battery life. From my experimenting, there's no combination of settings that can hit 60 frames per second in Stray without muddying the graphics up to the point of illegibility. Forcing a refresh rate limit of 40Hz in the Steam Deck performance menu is a good compromise, offering stable performance with decent smoothness. The difference between 60 and 40 fps is noticeable, but 40 is a sight better than 30 fps, which is what the PlayStation 4 Pro runs the game at.

Using the PS4 Pro as my point of reference, I put together this configuration of in-game and Steam Deck settings that provide a similar gaming experience on the Steam Deck. For even more frame time consistency, I dropped the resolution scaling to 90%, which is barely noticeable on the Steam Deck's 7-inch screen.

Graphics Settings
Fullscreen Disabled
Resolution 1280 x 800
Resolution Scale 90%
Max Frame Rate 60
Motion Blur 0%*
Sharpness 50%*
Effects Quality Medium
Shadow Quality Medium
Texture Quality High
Mesh Quality Medium
*Set to personal preference.
Steam Deck Performance Menu Settings
Refresh Rate 40
Framerate Limit 40
Allow Tearing On
Half Rate Shading Off
Thermal Power (TDP) Limit Off
Manual GPU Clock Control Off
Scaling Filter Linear