Hey everyone,
I’m planning to play SCP: Secret Laboratory (among other titles) on Steam Deck OLED. From what I’ve gathered online, it runs at about 30-40 fps on the lowest settings. Since the game is really designed for a mouse and keyboard, I was considering using the Dock to connect to an external monitor for a better setup.
I have both a Full HD and a 4K monitor. Of course, I’d prefer playing on the 4K screen, but I’m skeptical that the performance would hold up. Full HD is more realistic, and I’m totally fine with that if it means better gameplay stability.
So, my question is: How does it affect performance, especially for games like SCP: Secret Laboratory? Would there be a significant fps drop when using a monitor, particularly with 4K versus 1080p?
Any advice or personal experiences would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Depending on game, you can generally run at 720p or 1080p fine. You can do linear upscale (from the Deck’s QAM menu>power settings) to upscale to 4k for no real performance hit, but it won’t improve the graphical appearance either. Upscaling to 4k using FSR/etc is possible in some games, but usually has too much of a performance hit to be practical.
I’m reasonably sure that the size of the monitor doesn’t matter, but the resolution does. If you run your monitor at 720p, the performance should be the same as the Deck locally. If you try to run it at 4k (I’m not even sure how you’d convince the Deck to do that) it would decrease performance considerably.
I have my SD docked into a 4k monitor most of the time, and I can tell you with certainty that some games will struggle at 4k on the SD. You can still use the 4k monitor for them, just play at a lower resolution.
I have no experience with that specific game, but I connect my Steam Deck quite regularly to a 4k monitor, but running that in 1080p. Some games might depend more on the CPU and can take the bump up from 800p to 1080p just fine. I suggest you playing on the monitor you like the color/brightness the most, regardless of native resolution, locking the framerate at 30Hz and enabling FSR on the side menu. Try 1080p and if you notice a performance issue, go back to 720p.
