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Steam Deck owners use AI mods to squeeze 25% more FPS from CPU-heavy games

Daniel Cross 0 comments 2 min read

Steam Deck users are deploying AI- generated mods to boost frame rates in CPU- heavy games like Oblivion Remastered, though results come with stability risks.

Steam Deck owners use AI mods to squeeze 25% more FPS from CPU-heavy games
HANDHELD GAMING

The ceiling on what you can play on 's has a limit. Here's one possible solution in form of community powered AI mods. Early signs are showing artificial intelligence making code patches to improve frame rates for older games.

Steam Deck handheld gaming device
Deck handheld gaming device

Community-driven patches offer marginal gains at the cost of stability

It could keep your deck going for longer – and without needing to upgrade any hardware. This could be a lifesaver for people who have bought the device and are struggling with stutters in CPU heavy games.

We're mainly talking about AI generated mods. More specifically, mods generated with Claude AI. This is about getting more performance out of games such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered.

It involves automated reverse engineering to optimize code for the specific type of hardware used in the deck. Basically this is offloading the burden of optimizing from developers to community.

Oblivion Remastered tests claimed to see up to 25% in increased framerate for CPU heavy devices. When it came to author's tests, the gains were not as high. Instead the author saw a gain from 22 to 25 FPS.

There's also stutters when playing the game now. These are not patches that will get the Steam Deck Verified badge. They require a very strict stability benchmark to get that.

The article implies that AI can help optimize other heavy games like Gears of War: E-Day or Ace Combat 8. This leads to some worries as to how inexperienced users might use the AI generated code patches. It might be that these unverified code patches will make the game unstable or even break some of the functionality. People will have to decide if the small gains in performance is worth risking a broken experience.

We've been following Steam Deck performance issues. We looked at how the Playable Badge was misleading for Horizon Forbidden West in that respect. Back then we saw how not everything was always smooth with the official labels.

The AI generated mods are a community effort to fix things with game ports that aren't optimized. The community is busy playing with this in order to make their decks more usable in everyday situations.

Source: SteamDeckHQ

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