The Blood of Dawnwalker Handheld Performance Review 6

The Blood of Dawnwalker Handheld Performance Review

Out-of-Box Experience »

Graphics Settings

  • The game includes two settings menus: you can adjust visual quality in the Quality menu and a resolution and a few other settings such as VSync and Frame Rate Limit in the Display menu.
  • You can pick between four different presets: Low, Medium, High, and Ultra, with Ultra maxing out every option available.
  • The game supports FSR, XeSS, and DLSS upscaling, along with FSR and DLSS Frame Generation. Unfortunately, there's no XeSS Frame Generation or UE5's TSR upscaler.
  • You can freely disable Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, and Depth of Field.
  • From our experience, XeSS looks much better than FSR even on AMD handhelds, while providing about the same performance improvements, so we recommend using it instead of FSR.
  • You can choose between dedicated Fullscreen, Windowed Fullscreen, and Windowed modes, but since the game suffers from performance issues in the latter two modes, we strongly recommend using Fullscreen.
  • The game supports a granular framerate limit control in 1 FPS steps, ranging from 30 to whatever your monitor's native refresh rate is.
  • There's no hidden FPS lock.
  • Cutscenes are capped to 30 FPS, though, and are quite stuttery.
  • There's support for ultrawide monitors, but no native HDR support, at least not on PC.

Test Devices

We tested the public Steam version of The Blood of Dawnwalker.
  • The Steam Deck LCD was running SteamOS version 3.8.16, build 20260716.1.
  • Our ROG Xbox Ally X had Armoury Crate 2.2.17.0 installed along with BIOS 317.
  • The ROG Ally X had the latest Armoury Crate version installed at the time of testing (2.2.17.0), along with BIOS 312.
  • The MSI Claw 8 AI+ A2VM had MSI Center M 2.0.2606.2501 installed along with BIOS E1T52IMS.112.
  • The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ CG3EM had MSI Center M 2.0.2608.1201 installed along with BIOS E1T91IMS.10A.
Gaming Handhelds Used for Testing
Steam Deck LCDSteamOS version 3.8.16
build 20260716.1
ASUS ROG Xbox Ally XArmoury Crate 2.2.17.0
BIOS 317
GPU driver version: 32.0.31019.2002
Windows 11 Home 25H2
VBS disabled
ASUS ROG Ally XArmoury Crate 2.2.17.0
BIOS 312
GPU driver version: 32.0.31007.6002
Windows 11 Home 25H2
VBS disabled
Claw 8 AI+ A2VMMSI Center M 2.0.2606.2501
BIOS E1T52IMS.112
GPU driver version: 32.0.101.8992
Windows 11 Home 25H2
VBS disabled
Claw 8 AI+ EX CG3EMMSI Center M 2.0.2608.1201
E1T91IMS.10A
GPU driver version: 32.0.101.8992
Windows 11 Home 25H2
VBS disabled
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Nov 11th, 2026 18:45 CST change timezone

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