by In this tutorial, we will be showing you how to enable the FSR upscaling method on the Steam Deck.
Upscaling using techniques such as FSR allows you to get more performance out of your Steam Deck.
It achieves this by allowing you to run your games at a lower resolution and then upscaling them to the native resolution of the Steam Deck screens. Since you are running the games at a lower resolution, it will allow you to get more performance out of the Steam Decks hardware.
FSR is one of the few upscaling methods available on your Steam Deck. AMD developed it to provide a better-upscaled look than just resizing each pixel using an integer scale.
Luckily for us, SteamOS allows you to enable upscaling techniques very easily. In the following sections, we will show you how to enable FSR with just a few simple taps.
Turning On FSR on the Steam Deck
By the end of the following few sections, you should understand how to enable FSR on your Steam Deck. Additionally, we cover a few extra steps you may need to follow to get the upscaling technique working.
Using the Quick Access Menu to Enable FSR on the Steam Deck
1. To begin, you must open Steam’s Quick Access Menu.
You can open this menu by pressing the button with three dots (...) on it on your device. This button is located on the bottom right side of the device, as shown in the photo below.
2. With the quick access menu open, you need to change to the “Battery” icon tab.
This tab includes everything related to improving the performance of your Steam Deck, including enabling FSR.
3. Now scroll down till you see the “Scaling Filter” option.
As shown below, you will want to drag this slider until it hovers over the “FSR” option.
4. Once you have enabled FSR, the Steam Deck allows you to control the sharpness filter that is applied to the upscaled result.
If you found elements of this image to be too sharp, you can reduce it by lowering this value.
Checking if FSR is Active
5. Before we go any further, you will want a way of checking whether FSR is enabled.
The easiest way to do this is to enable the performance overlay. If you scroll to the top of the performance quick access menu, you will see an option labelled “Performance Overlay Level“
Change the “Performance overlay level” from 0 to 4.
6. By looking at the overlay that is now on your screen, you should see an option labelled “FSR” with either “OFF” or “ON” next to it.
If the text displays as “OFF“, then move on to our next section to see our tips for getting FSR to activate on your Steam Deck.
Troubleshooting why FSR isn’t Working
7. You may need to tweak a couple of options within the game you are playing for FSR to work.
Begin by opening up the settings page within the game that you are playing.
8. Within the settings page, start by lowing the resolution the game is rendering at. If it matches the resolution (1280x800) then FSR won’t be enabled.
The lower, the better performance improvements you will get. However, the quality will significantly worsen if it is too low, even with FSR enabled. So, play around with the resolution to strike the right balance between quality and performance.
9. If FSR is still showing as “Off” on your Steam Deck, you will want to try changing the Fullscreen option.
From our experience, we had to change games to “Windowed” mode for FSR to turn on.
10. If you still have the performance overlay up, you should see that the FSR option is now shown as “ON“.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you have successfully enabled the FSR upscaling technique on your Steam Deck.
This technology allows you to improve the performance you get out of your device by allowing you to run games at a lower resolution. FSR will upscale the game up to the resolution of your Steam Deck.
While the quality of upscaling is never good as native, it does allow you to get more performance if you are willing to put up with a reduction in quality.
Please comment below if you have questions about enabling FSR on your device.
If you found this guide helpful, be sure to check out our many other Steam Deck tutorials.
