The Outer Worlds 2 Handheld Performance Review 6

The Outer Worlds 2 Handheld Performance Review

Out-of-Box Experience »

Graphics Settings

  • There is just a single big graphics settings screen
  • Here you can find the usual monitor settings, "fullscreen," "borderless" and "windowed" are all supported
  • V-Sync can be disabled completely, there is no hidden FPS cap, the game is quite CPU limited though in some open areas, especially when hardware ray tracing is enabled
  • You may also set an FPS limit between 30 and 240 FPS
  • The upscalers available are: "Off," "TAA," "TSR," "FSR," "XeSS" and "DLSS"
  • Please note: when using TAA, there is a bug, that hides the scaling factor UI right below the upscaler list, and it defaults to 66%! So if you want to use TAA, make sure to enable TSR first, set upscaling to 100% or what you prefer, then switch back to TAA, so the right upscaling is applied.
  • Frame generation is available for NVIDIA and Intel but not for AMD, even though FSR 4 is supported for upscaling
  • Motion blur can be disabled
  • "Hardware Ray tracing" switches from the shader-based UE5 Lumen code to a hardware-accelerated approach. This is quite buggy though. For example, there will be lots of noise in the RT images as you can see on our screenshots, also the performance differences are quite small, but you are very heavily CPU limited in many areas, probably because of the BVH RT structure being rebuilt or updated too often
  • Graphics quality presets are: "low," "medium," "high" and "very high"
  • In addition to that there are the typical UE5 settings options
  • At the bottom you can adjust the FOV, between 46 and 115 degrees
  • Chromatic Aberration can be disabled as well

Test Devices

We tested the public Steam release of The Outer Worlds 2.
  • The Steam Deck LCD was running SteamOS version 3.7.15, build 20250903.1
  • Our ROG Ally X had the latest Armoury Crate version installed at the time of testing (2.1.10), along with BIOS 312
  • The ROG Xbox Ally X had Armoury Crate 2.1.10 installed along with BIOS 310
  • The ROG Ally with SteamOS was running SteamOS version 3.7.16, build 20250929.1
Gaming Handhelds Used for Testing
Steam Deck LCDSteamOS version 3.7.15
build 20250903.1
ASUS ROG Ally XArmoury Crate 2.1.10
BIOS 312
GPU driver version: 32.0.21013.11001
Windows 11 Home 24H2
VBS disabled
ASUS ROG Ally Z1E with SteamOSSteamOS version 3.7.16
build 20250929.1
ASUS ROG Xbox Ally XArmoury Crate 2.1.10
BIOS 310
GPU driver version: 32.0.21025.17000
Windows 11 Home 24H2
VBS disabled
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Nov 14th, 2026 19:17 CST change timezone

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