Best graphics settings for Sons of the Forest on Steam Deck

Now that the game’s early access has landed, let’s go over the best graphics settings for Sons of the Forest on Steam Deck.

We’ve already had a look at the best graphics settings for Sons of the Forest on PC. however, performance on PC and Steam Deck is not going to be the same. The Steam Deck, which we’ve compared with new rival Razer Edge, renders games in 720p, which is much lower than the 4K and 1080p gaming you might be accustomed to on PC.

As discussed in our PC page, the Steam Deck graphics settings presets are the following:

• Ultra Low: This mode favours a high frame rate, and really low fidelity
• Low: This mode also favours a high frame rate, and low fidelity
• Medium: This mode balanced texture quality and frame rate
• High: Mode favours high resolution textures with slight reductions in frame rate
• Ultra: Favours the best possible textures and graphical features

However, we’re going to optimising these settings carefully so that you can play Sons of the Forest in high frame rates, without sacrificing on visual fidelity:

Best graphics settings for Sons of the Forest on Steam Deck

While on gaming PC, we might have had a wide variety of options available to us, on the Steam Deck we’re going to be slightly limited. While we have the options to enable anisotropic textures, ambient occlusion and dynamic resolutions, it might be better for us to limit these features to optimise performance.

Before you begin you’re going to want to set the following settings via the Steam Deck’s Quick Access Mode, or the ‘…’ button in the bottom right:

• Framerate Limit – Off
• Refresh Rate – 60
• Allow Tearing – On
• Half Rate Shading – On
• TDP Limit – Off
• Manual GPU Clock – Off
• Scaling Filter – FSR

Best graphics settings for performance on Sons of the Forest for Steam Deck

While you might be used the best graphics cards pumping out high-fidelity visuals onto the best OLED gaming monitors, the Steam Deck has an AMD Console GPU that’s roughly equivalent to an Nvidia GTX 1050, which isn’t really the most powerful card at all. That doesn’t mean that it’s not good – but rather it’s not designed for the highest textures.

Here’s what we’d recommend for the best performance on Sons of the Forest for Steam Deck:

Display

• Resolution – 1280 x 720
• Fullscreen – Exclusive Fullscreen
• V-Sync – 30Hz

Calibrating V-Sync to 30Hz is actually one of the best ways to increase in-game performance. While running the game at 60Hz V-Sync, we actually saw a significant decrease in frame-rate, averaging between 24-29 FPS. However, with V-Sync set to 30Hz, we saw frame-rates between 50 – 60Hz

Graphics

• Quality Preset – Custom
• Draw Distance – Low
• Ambient Occlusion – Ultra Low
• Fog Quality – Off
• Anisotropic Textures – Off
• Shadow Quality – Low
• Clouds – Low
• Grass – Low
• Water – Low
• Parallax Distance – Low
• Billboard Quality – Low
• Texture Resolution – Eighth

Realistically, it seems as though Sons of the Forest isn’t quite optimised for running on Steam Deck. This is likely as the game is still in Early Access.

We’re going to be keeping an eye out for the latest information regarding Sons of the Forest on the Steam Deck, so make sure to check back in with us periodically.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Sons of the Forest have ray tracing on Steam Deck?

The Steam Deck isn’t capable of using ray-tracing as the GPU isn’t powerful enough.

Is Sons of the Forest 60FPS on Steam Deck?

Sons of the Forest can run at 60FPS on Steam Deck, however this is only possible if you sacrifice some texture and visual fidelity.