Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version
96 comments
·September 24, 2025nsagent
jsheard
If it's any consolation, the Deck LCD is discounted by 20% for the next few weeks if you need to pick up a new one.
boltzmann-brain
Big tip: get the LCD and a DeckHD. The mod takes a long time, but it's not technically difficult.
Yeah, I know most people will say the Deck is already too slow for 800p, so why would it pull 1080p well?
I have two decks, one's got Deck HD, the other doesn't. I render the Deck HD one at 540 native and upscale 2x with FSR. It looks way better than the stock display one and runs better as well. Similar with HZD and other highly demanding games.
That said, 99% of my time on the Deck is spent playing retro games. Does that need 1080p? No. Can it use it? Yes, very much so.
I never pick up the original deck anymore - the Deck HD modded one is just better.
foxbarrington
I tell people to get an LCD and xreal or viture AR glasses with the saved money. AR glasses are a WAY better display than a small OLED screen.
bhaney
The DeckHD website says it's sold out. Can I get the same display component without the installation kit from somewhere else? Is there a model or part identifier or something?
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
IMO, there are better ergonomics on competitors. Over a thousand + of hours using one, a steam deck is death for your wrists in comparison. When I was playing Elden Ring on the SD for a few hundred hours, I almost thought I needed to have surgery. There are strategies to help with this, rest it on a pillow on your lap, or whatever, but you won't experience that with some of these.
- https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/handheld/legion-go/len106g000...
- https://rog.asus.com/gaming-handhelds-group/
Honestly, I think a gaming laptop and a controller makes more sense for most things, if you don't need that little bit of increased portability.
sweetgiorni
Glad I'm not the only one with that issue. I ended up connecting a Bluetooth controller to my Steam Deck because holding it hurt my wrists so much. At that point, why bother with the thing?
nullbyte808
Bazzite on PC is much better.
brokencode
May as well get a Switch 2 at this point. Then at least it’s something new.
petralithic
A Switch and a Steam Deck are orthogonal purchases.
baby
I got the switch 2 and day one and I've mostly been playing the deck since then. There isn't much on the switch (besides mario kart and donkey kong), and the stuff that is cross-platform doesn't run well (the new "it takes two" is really laggy).
hug
May as well replace all of your apples with oranges while you're at it.
The Switch 2 and the Steam Deck are hugely different machines, despite sharing a form factor.
Vilian
That's amazing, it would be interesting to see benchmarks comparing the two versions
rbits
Yeah that would be nice. Some native Linux versions actually have worse performance than Proton when they're done poorly. I got ~60fps on the Linux version of Silksong, but 400fps running the Windows version through Proton.
hunterloftis
That sounds like possibly a configuration issue rather than strictly performance (although I agree the symptom is worse performance). For instance, specifically the value "~60fps" vs something as high as 400fps sounds like running with vsync enabled vs. with it disabled.
neuroelectron
Wow, I wonder if it would be easier to just target proton directly
johncolanduoni
It definitely is if you have an engine with a DX12 backend but no Vulkan backend. Nothing stops you from detecting Proton and then tweaking uses of the DX12 APIs that translate poorly to Vulkan, and there's no way adding a whole new rendering backend will be easier than writing the extra code paths in the DX12 one.
Telaneo
It would be, since targeting proton is largely just targeting Windows and not falling into a few traps most games don't fall into anyway.
nullbyte808
sounds like the game was capped to 60
reilly3000
Whatever they are doing to make the image fit 100% is not retaining aspect ratio on mobile Safari. The cookies banner was initially full width and the content was in a small column to the left and I had to zoom to get to it. I’ve never viewed a Steam Deck web layout outside of its element before.
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bigyabai
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.bigyabai
Slick! Worth noting that Baldurs Gate 3 runs fine through Proton already - I played it on Linux at release with zero issues.
giancarlostoro
Worth noting that some games run better on Linux than on Windows and have for a few years now. Crazy.
bigyabai
Yeah, I noticed this myself ~4 years ago when I was playing Overwatch on a relatively low-spec PC. Gave me 10-20% GPU headroom and ~2gb of extra RAM I never had on Windows.
lyu07282
Yep 1000h+ on Linux here, it's flawless
0cf8612b2e1e
After some patches, that is debatable: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-companions-...
moelf
>Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
huh? but Steam Deck is just normal Arch Linux with x86_64 ~~aarch64~~?...
pxx
it's not even aarch64. but what they're saying is they don't want to deal with the support nightmare of supporting anything but the unmodifiable SteamOS image.
armada651
Yeah that was my take as well, it's more of a nod to the fact that you _can_ run it on other devices but you should expect not any help from them.
moelf
oh right, it's just AMD Zen2...
viraptor
Every distro is a bit different though. And there's kernel / libc versions and the whole gui server on top of that. Windows gives you a few configurations to check, Mac does as well. But Linux means hundreds of possible setups before you even get to hardware differences. They just don't want to deal with that.
tapoxi
Steam runs all games in a container called the Steam Linux Runtime, so the only difference is the kernel and host Mesa drivers.
rfarley04
I really appreciate this. But color me skeptical that the late game will work on SD. It chugs on PCs. Hopefully they conjured a miracle!
verandaguy
I don't want to be one of those unbearable apologists in forum threads... but BG3's legitimately my favourite game, and IMO Larian have been excellent stewards, so I'll go up to bat for them here; have you played the newer patches?
For the first few months, act 3 (in the city) was legitimately hard to play. Performance, stability, visual glitches, all pervasive. But later patches did do a better job of improving those points.
Act 3's still the most intensive part of the game by far so on many setups it's still wise to at least crank down the crowd density, but it's come a long way since the launch version of the game.
boltzmann-brain
To me, BG3 is basically a system seller for the deck.
babuloseo
I streamed BG3 on the deck, I played it with one of those logitech keyboards on my living room tv setups, was pretty great
hinkley
They are partway through creating two new games.
It’s possible that some of the engine improvements could be easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements could be a little more oomph.
Edit:
> Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power. Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall!
Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I suspect more has gone on.
alexchantavy
Shame they said they’re not going to do more in the Forgotten Realms though, I love this campaign setting
hinkley
They are currently building their capacity to do multiple games in parallel.
I suspect not wanting to do BG4 is at the end of the day a negotiation tactic. There’s an amount of money and consideration that will make them put it back in the queue. But it’s likely at least five years out before they start on such a thing.
They’ll want to avoid the Torchlight trap, where the team got sick of doing Diablo clones and the company kind of cratered afterward.
boltzmann-brain
Same.
I would really love them to do a Fallout game. The original two games had a lot of properties to them that 3 and subsequent games just ignored or straight up went against, including NV. To me, as a fan who grew up with the first two, it's like a different game series.
gilgoomesh
They've supported the Steam Deck for a couple years now.
Here's a review of Steam Deck performance from early 2024: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/baldurs-gate-3/
I'm assuming this is just an effort to slightly improve things.
rfarley04
Yea, I could also blame steam's SD verification system, which just rates compatibility without giving much thought to performance. Cause I'm aware BG3 "works" on SD but walk into an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an impressionist painting at 10fps
cultofmetatron
> but walk into an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an impressionist painting at 10fps
I feel like this describe how I feel about life in general. maybe we really are living in a simulation.
bigyabai
ProtonDB is better for gauging the performance penalty, giving different "medals" in accordance with how good/easily it runs on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/
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kibwen
I played it on Steam Deck when it first came out (docked, standard HD display). It was perfectly acceptable, as long as you're fine with semi-stable 30 FPS and cranking down the graphics a tad. The only real problem that I encountered was that the game wouldn't recognize or remember my input settings, and would always default to controller-only, so I would have to attach a controller to navigate to the menu to switch it to keyboard; hopefully the Deck-native version fixes that.
bmurphy1976
It played tolerably until act 3, same with my M1 MacBook Pro. Act 3 was awful on both.
kibwen
I fully admit that I spent 40 delicious hours faffing about in Act 1 and then put it down out of fear that I'd never get anything else done. :P
fyrabanks
fwiw, my wife played through it on SD while i played through on my PC. it's a completely different experience, but it's very do-able. she also went on to replay it 4 more times after that, which is 5 more times than i finished the game.
ben-schaaf
When was the last time you played? They've been making continuous performance improvements and act 3 hasn't chugged on my PC for a long time. Even steam deck seems to get a steady 30fps.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
It runs fine on a SD card on a steam deck for me. It is a good travel game.
shawnz
To be clear, did you test the game in Act 3? Because Act 3 generally has significantly worse performance than other parts of the game
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
Yeah, I have played through the game like three or four times on a steam deck.
There are some hiccups at times, but it is acceptable, IMO.
Gigachad
Tbh the vast majority of players never made it to act 3
esseph
Chugs on PCs? What kind of PC?
snvzz
(from the FAQ)
>>Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux?
>Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
Only half a step forward.
SchemaLoad
This is not a huge issue though. The game runs perfect on Proton on Linux, the problem is really just on the Steam Deck it had poor performance. But on the average desktop it runs flawless.
I'm just happy the Steam Deck seems to be pushing devs to make sure their games run on low power hardware. Really any game should be able to run fine on the Steamdeck, there's no gameplay that isn't possible to run on the hardware. It's just the lack of engineering time spent on making sure the graphics have a proper low option.
extraduder_ire
The existence of "steamdeck" as a graphics preset in a bunch of games is really a boon for anyone using a gaming handheld, especially as hardware improves. Provides a bar for manufacturers to clear too.
chowells
Not supported means they're not debugging your broken system. It doesn't mean the game doesn't work when your system isn't broken.
jchw
I think from Valve's end you can't really do one without the other, so at the very least I am sure it will run just fine elsewhere. This sort of mentality will probably slowly fade if more SteamOS devices hit the market successfully.
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jakebasile
This is extremely common. There's a vanishingly small number of games that officially support the Steam Deck that do NOT unofficially run on any given Linux box. That small number seems to be exclusively gacha games. A number of those can be made to run by setting `SteamDeck=1 %command%` as the launch command.
Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.
null
AceJohnny2
Meh, useless purity check.
Gaming on Linux is hard because there's not one Linux, there's tons of Linuses. What version of the glibc/libstdc++/mesa/xorg/wayland/kernel/drivers are you running?
The Linux ecosystem is fragmented in such a way that only open-source and an army of volunteers can really work around. It is really not binary-friendly at a fundamental, philosophical level.
(You're not going to get game companies to open-source their games, except as an exception, and after their economic life is finished)
The Steam Deck provides one well-known hardware and software platform that a vendor can reasonably target. Don't expect much more except by the most dedicated developer.
hurricanepootis
Valve provides a common runtime/build environment for Linux devs in the form of the Steam Linux Runtime. There is version 1 (Scout), which uses an LD_PRELOAD system. There is version 2 (Soldier), which uses cgroups (podman) and is deprecated. Then, there is version 3 (Sniper), which is the current target.
As of right now, proton and proton-ge both build in and require Steam Runtime Version 3 to run in. The steam client itself is running in a runtime, and I think it is the scout runtime, so LD_PRELOAD based. This means that steam has its own common platform to "deploy" against, and all Linux native games have a common platform to deploy against.
It used to be that games had to be compiled in a chroot for Steam runtime 1.0, but now with Steam runtime 3.0, developers are heavily recommended to build their game in a "OCI-based container framework"—so podman basically—and enable the Steam Runtime 3.0 on steam. I know that TF2 and Dota 2 use steam runtime 3.0, and apparently so does Retroarch. Of course, since there is a podman/docker image, you can also test existing games to see if they run in the runtime too.
You can find a lot of more information about the steam runtime 3.0 here: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk
Valve has a gitlab with lots of great docs for developers who want to publish a linux native game.
I think all native linux games will run in the Scout 1.0 runtime by default
Edit: I will say that as an end-user, running an up-to-date Linux kernel and Mesa stack is important for gaming. I know some people who run Mint and are surprised that their Radeon RX 9060 runs like ass. As long as you aren't using a Debian based LTS distro, like mint or ubuntu lts, or you are running those distro but get a newer kernel, you should be fine. This matters less for older hardware, but having a newer kernel and especially a newer mesa version is important.
MindSpunk
The fact we need containers to ship games is still a complete joke. Windows has been shipping binary games for decades but to do a best-effort portable Linux build you've got to spin up containers with bespoke build environments and tie the build to one specific platform's container image.
The alternative is using (what is effectively) a cross compiling toolchain to target Linux from itself! Or spin up an ancient Debian image (including ancient compiler) to build against ancient glibc.
It's hard to blame anyone for just using Proton, with the perma-stable Win32 API. No build containers, no chroot, no locking the build to Steam. Just the same build infra you already have.
babuloseo
use CachyOS if you are gaming.
gbraad
I don't have BG3, but wondetr if this 'works' on Bazzite in that case.
saubeidl
I bet it still works, it's just not supported. It's just arch on an AMD chip after all.
recursivecaveat
It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux. A lot of games fall into this bracket with proton of "devs not willing to commit to Linux support, but does actually work".
Gigachad
SteamOS isn’t just Arch, it’s significantly custom and doesn’t have access to the arch repos.
The window manager, package manager, etc are completely custom. The OS is a read only image based system.
bigstrat2003
And honestly I'm fine with that. Given the permutations involved I think it's reasonable for Larian to not commit to supporting them all. And as you said, it will probably work fine.
babuloseo
The trick to playing BG3 is to play it on your deck by streaming, you can play so many games via streaming via usb-c to ethernet, always wire your house and every room with ethernet PEOPLE.
Bought the game when it came out, but still haven't had the time to play. Just flew out for a three week vacation with my Steam Deck in tow. Unfortunately, I left it on the plane and I haven't heard back from lost and found yet (seems unlikely I'll get it back considering it was an international flight). Oh well.