Steam Machine FSR Benchmarks: Which of These Six Games Are Actually Playable?

Testing frame rates across a range of demanding titles gives a clearer picture of what a new gaming system can realistically handle. A round of testing on the Steam Machine covered six games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy 16, Ghost of Tsushima, Sekiro, Hogwarts Legacy, and Devil May Cry 5, comparing native rendering against FSR upscaling across different resolutions and settings.

Cyberpunk 2077 ran at less than 30 fps with ray tracing turned off, all settings on high or ultra, FSR in quality mode, and a resolution of 4K. This is not a playable speed. When I switched to FSR performance mode, the image quality stayed mostly the same, and the frame rate stayed around 30 fps. Things got a lot better when I set the resolution to 2K and kept FSR on quality mode.

The frame rate dropped to between 40 and 45 fps, but the image quality remained sharp. With these settings, the game ran smoothly and was totally playable, sometimes getting close to 50 fps. A few more settings changes would probably let a stable 60 fps cap be reached.

Hogwarts Legacy Needs an Upscaler

At native 4K with all settings on ultra and no upscaler enabled, Hogwarts Legacy ran at 20-23 fps, which is not a workable frame rate. Enabling FSR in quality mode at the same resolution improved performance to around 30 fps, with noticeably smoother performance and strong image quality. 

Dropping to 2K resolution while keeping FSR in quality mode pushed performance up to around 50 fps, offering a considerably better experience than native 4K. From the start, Sekiro ran smoothly. It held around 50 fps in an open area with the highest settings and no upscaler. Sekiro can only run at 60 fps, so switching to 2K resolution kept performance at that level. The picture quality was also very close to that of 4K.

Ghost of Tsushima Benefits Significantly From FSR

Ghost of Tsushima ran at about 35 fps in 4K with all settings on high and no upscaler turned on. When FSR3.1 was enabled in quality mode, it exceeded 50 fps, making the experience much smoother. 

Changing the resolution to 2K while keeping FSR on sped up frame rates even more, landing between 90 and 100 fps, which felt very smooth the whole time. Final Fantasy 16 required a restart due to unusually poor initial performance. 

At 4K with FSR set to quality mode and all settings on high, performance remained poor even after the restart. Switching to 2K resolution with FSR set between quality and performance modes produced little meaningful improvement. Based on this testing, Final Fantasy 16 does not currently run at a playable level on the Steam Machine.

The results varied widely across these six games because of how well they handled FSR upscaling.

Devil May Cry 5 performed strongly without any upscaling. At native 4K, with all settings on ultra and no upscaler enabled, the game ran between 75 and 80 fps comfortably. Given how well it performed at native 4K, testing at 2K resolution was not considered necessary.

Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, and Ghost of Tsushima all needed to be upscaled and, most of the time, downscaled to 2K resolution to get frame rates stable enough to play. Sekiro and Devil May Cry 5 ran well even without upscaling because they didn't require as powerful a machine. Final Fantasy 16 was the worst performer; it couldn't be played at any of the resolutions or upscaling levels tested.