Out-of-Box Experience on SteamOS

While Resident Evil Requiem isn't officially Steam Deck compatible, the game runs without issues on SteamOS. During the initial launch, you have to wait a few minutes for shaders to compile, but after that, it's mostly smooth sailing. Subsequent launches don't include the shader compilation step.


The only issue we encountered during testing was SteamOS rebooting almost every time after exiting the game, on both our Steam Deck and ROG Ally running SteamOS. You can prevent this by force-closing the game by opening the "Steam" menu. Other than that, we didn't encounter any problems with the game.


It runs smooth as butter, with only an occasional slight stutter on Steam Deck when you set textures to "Normal" due to the handheld not having enough VRAM. You can remedy this by dropping textures to low. On ROG Ally with SteamOS, we didn't experience any stuttering.


Ray tracing options are missing on Steam Deck, but you have access to the full suite of visual options. The good news is that you can get stable 30 FPS performance on the Steam Deck without upscaling nor switching to the "Lowest" graphics preset.


If you prefer performance to eye candy, you can drop all settings to Low, enable upscaling, and reach a more or less stable 40 FPS experience, with the game still looking okayish, which is almost unheard of in 2026. As much as the RE Engine is a dumpster fire when it comes to open-world games, the engine is one of the best there is for games with relatively confined maps such as this one.


The game performs great on our Z1 Extreme-powered ROG Ally running SteamOS as well. The OG ROG Ally can run RE Requiem at ~40 FPS at 720p native, with a custom set of options that looks better than the "Normal" preset, which is fantastic. All you've got to do is set VRAM allocation to 6 GB, and you're good to go, since the game is rather modest when it comes to RAM usage.

Out-of-Box Experience on Windows

On Windows, the shader compilation step takes about four minutes, noticeably longer than on SteamOS. The game crashed and rebooted Windows when we first opened it on the ROG Xbox Ally X, but during subsequent plays, we didn't encounter any crashes or other problems.


On the Xbox Ally X and ROG Ally X, you can enable ray tracing effects, but you should probably ignore them. Like on SteamOS, Resident Evil Requiem is smooth as butter on Windows. You might encounter stutters if your machine has only 4 GB of memory allocated to video memory and textures set to normal, but you can eliminate the stuttering by increasing the VRAM allocation to 6 GB.


Resident Evil Requiem runs great both on the ROG Xbox Ally X and ROG Ally X. On the Z2 Extreme handheld, you can get away with ~40 FPS performance at 900p native and better-than-medium settings at 25 W, which is kind of impressive, especially when you see just how good-looking the game is in motion. The ROG Ally X can achieve the same performance with upscaling, but we'd rather drop the resolution to 720p because, at least to us, native 720p looks better than 900p with upscaling, and it runs better too.

Resident Evil Requiem plays great on a controller. If you don't like playing first-person games with thumbsticks, you can switch to a third-person camera when playing as Grace.