Whereas Counter-Strike 2 will rightly cater to aggressive gamers on PCs and laptops as a precedence, it appears these trying to play an off-the-cuff sport on the Steam Deck are surprisingly out of luck in the mean time. Regardless of Valve having its arms 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 sport’s retailer web page, all appears nicely concerning CS2 Steam Deck compatibility. Nonetheless, we imagine 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 sport 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 needed for it. Whereas this doesn’t occur once more with the shotgun, this conduct rears its ugly head with each weapon I fireplace for the primary time.
To make issues worse, efficiency is under no circumstances the place it must be, attributable to 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 sport’s menu. This isn’t as a result of the system doesn’t meet the CS2 system necessities, 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 machine. That stated, I’ve little question 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 probably see Counter-Strike 2 be a part of the ranks of one of the best Steam Deck video games as one other FPS feather within the system’s cap. For now, although, there’s clearly work to be carried out.
