Can you play Dune: Awakening on Steam Deck, ROG Ally and other gaming handhelds?

Dune: Awakening finally has a release date, and it's not too far away. Not only does it finally have a date players can finally experience it, but ahead of that, a handy benchmark tool has been released for folks to check it out way in advance and see what kind of performance they can expect to get.

That's particularly useful for owners of the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and other gaming handhelds. This far out, the official line on compatibility from Steam is missing, but that doesn't matter so much when you can try the benchmark for free and see for yourself.

We've run the benchmark on the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally and the new Lenovo Legion Go S, and the results are surprisingly positive. Note, the final game could be completely different, and there will be additional factors such as server latency to take into account that may impact overall gameplay. We have no information on that at this point, this is purely based on the benchmark tool, which we hope is an accurate reflection.

Can you play Dune: Awakening on Steam Deck?

The results on the Steam Deck are perhaps the most surprising. Here are the settings tested.

• Resolution: 1280 x 800
• Graphics settings: Low
• FSR 3: Performance
• Frame Gen: On
• Vsync: Off
• Proton version: Experimental

Using the settings above, the Steam Deck generated an average FPS of 67.7, which is outstanding. It should allow you to experiment a little with some higher settings and still have a playable experience.

However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. While the frame rate is good, the frame time graph on the Steam Deck is a little all over the place, and it's not the smoothest experience, with drops to 35-40 FPS in brief sections. This could also be attributed to Frame Gen, which, for whatever reason, is on by default.

To turn it off you need to go into Custom for your graphics settings. Running again without Frame Gen on the Steam Deck resolved the mad frametime graph and still gave a playable experience at an average FPS of 44.5 with all the same settings.

All that said, we're over two months out from launch at the time of writing, and there are likely still improvements that can still be made both in the game and inside Proton.

Using Proton Experimental over Proton 9.0.4 already yielded a significant improvement in average frame rate, jumping up from 57.7 (Frame Gen on). So I'm hopeful that as we get closer to launch, further optimizations will make for a good experience.

Can you play Dune: Awakening on the ROG Ally, Legion Go, and Legion Go S?

At this point, the Steam Deck is the lowest on the totem pole for outright performance, as well as the fact that it's based on Linux and so has to rely on Proton to even run at all. So a good performance on Steam Deck usually means a good, or better, performance on a Windows 11 handheld like the ROG Ally.

We've tried it on both the ROG Ally X (which will be mostly the same as the regular Ally given they use the same chip) and the Legion Go S which uses the new AMD Z2 Go.

First up on the Legion Go S, these are the settings tested.

• Resolution: 1280 x 800
• Graphics settings: Low
• FSR 3: Performance
• Frame Gen: On
• Vsync: On

Performance on the Legion Go S mirrors the Steam Deck, with a steady FPS between 67 and 76 thanks to Frame Gen, with similar drops to below 40 FPS at points. Since the AMD Z2 Go is, on paper, a mild update in specs over the Steam Deck APU, this fits. The Legion Go S also allocated 8GB of VRAM, despite not needing that much. By comparison, the Steam Deck was using just over 4GB.

On the ROG Ally X you would expect more, and that seems to be the case. Here are the settings:

• Resolution: 1280 x 720
• Graphics settings: Medium
• FSR 3: Performance
• Frame Gen: On
• Vsync: On

The superior horsepower of the ROG Ally X shows through by running easily at higher settings and still generating an even higher frame rate of up to 103 FPS. The drops were still present, but only as low as 56 FPS here. It's highly likely you could play at higher settings and still get to 60 FPS.

Without Frame Gen on it's still pretty good, anywhere between 60-80 FPS, though still with some pretty severe dips at times to below 40 FPS. Strangely, on Windows, the dips seem to be worse than on the Steam Deck.

We've a while longer to find out what general gameplay is like, but on the benchmark, at least, we should at least be able to play on our handhelds.