Just curious how Diablo 4 / battle.net performs after installation on the Steam Deck. Do I have to fiddle with settings after every update or once I go through the setup steps am I good to go?
Setup and you’re good to go. The game actually runs fantastically well on the Deck. Medium settings with FSR 2 Balanced drains 15W in dungeons and the open world, 23W in town. Hits a flat 40fps so if you frame limit in-game and set the Steam Deck to run in 40Hz mode, you get ultra smooth gameplay.
The only issues I have are with the Battlenet launcher, it sometimes crashes during startup when first opening D4 seemingly at random but once the game is running I don’t have any issues. Currently running it on Proton Experimental.
As far as settings go, at default settings D4 seems to be extremely taxing on the GPU (constant >=97% usage, high temps, crashes regularly after running for a while), although this seems to be common to all systems including PS5/Xbox.
Locking refresh rate and in-game menu FPS to 50fps keeps the power and GPU usage much lower and I get stable performance with no crashes.
Following up again. It’s much better playing with a 45 FPS cap and with FSR off than 60 cap and FSR on.