Frostpunk 2: Performance Review and Best Settings on Steam Deck

Here’s how to fine-tune the settings in Frostpunk 2 for the best experience on your Steam Deck

Describing the apocalyptic setting of 11bit Studio’s survival city builder, Frostpunk, as ‘harsh’ would be a significant understatement. In the original, making difficult choices to safeguard your city and its residents was a common occurrence. The first game blended an immersive ambience with occasional ethical dilemmas, making for something truly unique. Recently, the sequel was released, shedding light on a new chapter.

While 11bit Studio has intensified the cruel world-building here, they’ve also streamlined how you play, and the overall gameplay loop, with a bigger emphasis on city expansion and the constant juggling of dilemmas and their inevitable outcomes — especially since there’s often more to these decisions than you’d expect. 

It also helps that Frostpunk 2 utilises newer Unreal Engine features, giving us more flexibility in tweaking the performance on Steam Deck, especially since the first game was nearly unplayable on Valve’s handheld PC.

Harsh, brutal, yet playable

Upon the first launch, *Frostpunk 2* defaults to a mix of low and medium settings, paired with Temporal Super Resolution (Unreal Engine’s built-in upscaling tech, TSR) set to 'balanced.' I couldn’t believe my eyes when I jumped into the game’s first chapter and was greeted by surprisingly high frame rates—an inconsistent range between 28 and 50 FPS, depending on the camera angle, your distance to the ground, and some oddities that I’ll touch on later.

The fact that the game can reach more than 30 FPS on Steam Deck caught me off guard and gave me hope that we’d be able to find a sweet spot for performance. After all, we’re talking about a full-fledged strategy game, not a shooter. However, you’ll soon find that the game’s genre introduces some challenges to the city survival experience on the Deck. But first things first…

I wondered why 11bit Studios chose a default of TSR instead of AMD’s Fidelity Super Resolution (FSR), which is also available in Frostpunk 2. After some back and forth between TSR and FSR in various scenarios, it became clear that while FSR offers performance gains, it also introduces more upscaling artefacts, which often affect smaller details during movement — and yes, in a game with snowflakes flying around constantly, we want to avoid those if possible.

Thankfully, TSR does a great job when set to 'balanced' and even more so at 'quality,' if you don’t mind sacrificing a bit of stability. I prefer sharp visuals and finer details over additional frames per second, especially in more atmospheric and slower-paced games like Frostpunk 2.

Lighting, fog, and city details undoubtedly have the biggest impact on overall performance, cutting almost 10-20% from the frame rate. As a result, I decided to keep them all at 'very low,' especially since lighting (among other things) uses Unreal’s Lumen to accurately light the environment and props via ray-tracing when set to 'medium' or higher. Everything else was manageable at 'low' or even 'medium' for some settings.

However, my biggest gripe with Frostpunk 2’s performance isn’t the occasional hiccups when zooming into the city or clicking through different layers to check your population: Every pop-up, every window or element comes accompanied with fancy alpha channel effects, which look great, but add unnecessary rendering workload. At the time of writing, these effects cannot be disabled either; so we have to deal with regularly seeing framerate dips into the 20s.

On top of that, it seems like you fare a bit better with a fixed GPU clock through the Deck’s Quick Action Menu. While no GPU lock results in massive frametime variations, 1400MHz seems like the golden spot for our 30FPS target. In comparison, 1500MHz results in more frametime hiccups, as seen below.

Though this is something to keep an eye on, as it heavily depends on the scenario—so your mileage may vary.

A fitting lack of comfort?

Frostpunk 2 completely lacks any controller support whatsoever. Yeah, I know—reckless, right? But somehow, it fits the game’s setting.

According to colleagues, there’s an ‘official community layout’ somewhere, but on my end, the game didn’t default to it, nor could I find it. During my first few hours, I resorted to the standard WASD layout, which essentially turns both trackpads into the mouse, the left joystick into the directional equivalent of WASD, and so on. Whatever discomfort you’re imagining right now was indeed the case, but I pushed through it.

As it turned out, there exists a great community layout created by User Hadxmen, utilising all input options to perfection; which I quickly got used to. Make sure to check it out, by searching for “Frostpunk 2 Steam Deck” in the ‘community layouts’ tab!

To add to the gameplay roughness, you’ll quickly notice that all popups and elements, which are anchored in the game world, regularly tend to be partly hidden at the screen’s edge. A simple camera move in that direction usually fixes this issue - but this happens all the time and will quickly annoy.

Still, despite its genre, Frostpunk 2 is surprisingly playable on Valve’s handheld. 11bit Studio’s worked on many different aspects in terms of menu usability and the overall gameplay flow; so to think a survival city builder like this wouldn’t be a good fit on the Steam Deck would be a lie.

For a bonus tip: In the game's general settings, you can adjust the font size by selecting the 'BIG' option for UI Text Scale. This can be helpful if you find that the game's elements are too small for your liking.

Best Settings for Frostpunk 2 on Steam Deck

With all these findings in mind, these are the most optimised settings I was able to work out as of right now — focussing on a mostly stable 30FPS target with improved visuals and added clarity, when compared to the game’s default settings.

On a full battery, your OLED Steam Deck will last around 2.5 hours, while on an LCD Deck, we can expect up to two hours at best.

Frostpunk 2 on Steam

Develop, expand, and advance your city in a society survival game set 30 years after an apocalyptic blizzard ravaged Earth. In Frostpunk 2, you face not only the perils of never-ending winter, but also the powerful factions that watch your every step inside the Council Hall.

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