Gothic 1 Remake is not good on Steam Deck, but what about ROG Ally?
THQ Nordic and Alkimia Interactive are launching Gothic 1 Remake today for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC (Steam). Ahead of its launch, I've had a chance to play Gothic 1 Remake on Steam Deck and ROG Ally for a few days to cover my performance impressions, Steam Deck recommended settings, and more. My impressions are based on about 9 hours with the game across my PC handhelds.
Gothic 1 Remake PC port features
Gothic 1 Remake on PC ships with support for uncapped frame rates, and field of view (FOV) slider, various post-processing options (blur, bloom, ambient occlusion, depth of field), upscaling options (FSR 3.1.4, XeSS 1.3.1, TSR, and DLSS) with different quality levels, overall render quality presets (Low, Medium, High, Gothic / Very High, Alkimia Overdose / Experimental, Custom, and Recommended), and then individual render options.
These let you adjust the quality for view distance, anti-aliasing, shadows, global illumination, reflection, post-processing, texture, effects, foliage, shading, landscape, and wind. Gothic 1 Remake also has full keyboard & mouse support in addition to controller support on PC. You can also adjust what button prompts to display for controller inputs across Auto, Xbox Series, PS5, and Switch prompts.
Gothic 1 Remake Steam Deck impressions
When I first launched Gothic 1 Remake on Steam Deck, it defaulted to the Gothic (Very High) preset with FSR 3.1.4 set to Balanced. Gothic 1 Remake does support 800p, but it was a slideshow with these settings running at around 10fps. Since it is an Unreal Engine 5 game, I immediately set everything to the lowest possible settings and enabled TSR instead of FSR. TSR looks a lot better than FSR in Gothic 1 Remake.
Gothic 1 Remake is a very heavy game to run on PC handhelds and even at the absolute lowest possible settings, I wasn't able to get a stable 30fps experience. It dipped below even early on with some freezing, but the bigger issue is that the game looks really bad on the low preset when using heavy upscaling. It looks just about fine on the medium preset with upscaling, but runs below 30fps often and around 24 or 25fps even out of combat in the open locations. I don't recommend the medium preset on Deck right now.
One more issue I ran into on the lowest settings is shadows glitching out where they distort or fade in and out of view even when you are standing still. I'm not sure if this is related to the hardware being too underpowered to run the game or a game-specific issue, but it was quite distracting. I also tried forcing the GPU clock speed using the Quick Access Menu if it would help with performance or stability and it did not.
Gothic 1 Remake Steam Deck recommended settings
As you can tell, my recommendation is to not play Gothic 1 Remake on Steam Deck right now. Hopefully the team can optimize it a bit more so you at least hit 30fps on the lowest settings, but you cannot right now.
Gothic 1 Remake ROG Ally impressions
Gothic 1 Remake on ROG Ally (Z1 Extreme model) defaults to the same Gothic (Very High) preset with FSR set to Balanced. With this, you get about 15 to 20fps in the open areas so don't even bother starting a new game without getting into the settings. When turning everything to the lowest settings at 1080p, Gothic 1 Remake suffers from constant hitching and stuttering. Once this settles after a few minutes of running around in the area, you get a 30+fps experience at 1080p with performance upscaling using TSR, but it hitches again if any new effect or anything loads in. Until these shader-related issues are sorted, I cannot recommend Gothic 1 Remake on ROG Ally. In fact, it has less hitching and freezing on Steam Deck right now, though that has its own issues as I covered above.
In its current state, Gothic 1 Remake is not worth playing on Steam Deck and ROG Ally Z1E. I'm not sure if it is more stable on the ROG Ally X model or a proper high end PC setup, but it isn't ready for the PC handhelds I have. Hopefully it gets updated soon after launch to improve performance. I will revisit the game after major updates. I'm looking forward to playing the PS5 build as I will likely finish Gothic 1 Remake there.
Gothic 1 Remake is now available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam). Stay tuned for our review coverage.