Best settings for Dead by Daylight on Steam Deck

Dead By Daylight’s horrors are ready to scare on the go, as the online horror runs great on Steam Deck right out of the box.

Playing Dead by Daylight on the Steam Deck used to be a terrifying experience. In the past, the asymmetrical online horror game‘s integration of anti-easy cheat software left Steam Deck and Linux users with the horror of being kicked out of online matches.

Thankfully, since early last year, developer Behaviour has fully supported Dead by Daylight on the Valve handheld. Whether you prefer to track down survivors or try and survive yourself, playing Dead by Daylight on Steam Deck is no longer a hellish experience, and we’ve gathered the best settings so it stays that way.

Can you play Dead by Daylight on Steam Deck?

Dead by Daylight is fully verified for Steam Deck and performs great with its default settings. However, a stable internet connection is required for the best portable DBD experience.

With its default settings, Dead by Daylight runs great on the Steam Deck, able to hit around 60 FPS right out of the box.

Since May 2023, however, the online horror has been officially fully verified for playing on the go. We’ve discovered that the default settings perform great on the handheld, with the game able to hit an average of 60 FPS with no major visible drops or issues.

Behaviour Interactive Inc / NBC

The only major caveat with playing Dead by Daylight on Steam Deck is that it needs a stable internet connection to avoid any unwanted lag or performance drops.

With that in mind, our only real recommendation is to ensure you have a strong, and stable connection when playing Dead by Daylight on the go. If you typically play the Steam Deck docked, ensuring your Steam Deck dock has ethernet support will go a long way.

Lastly, while Dead by Daylight isn’t that graphically intensive, it can be a big battery drain. When running the game on the Steam Deck OLED model, we discovered that a full change gave us only around two and a half hours of gameplay. Taking that into account, we recommend ensuring your Steam Deck charger is always at arm’s length to avoid any battery life horrors.

Dead by Daylight Steam Deck best settings

• Quality: Medium
• V-Sync: Off
• FPS Limit: 60
• Anti-Aliasing: TAA
• FSR: On, 100%

While Dead by Daylight works great out of the box, we discovered that changing some of the in-game settings will help ensure you have the best experience on the go. Supersampling like FSR also allows us to push the limits of what we can do.

We tested these out on the Steam Deck OLED, where we managed to hover around 67FPS when V-Sync was off. As it can’t hit 90FPS, we recommend limiting the refresh rate in the […] performance menu to 60Hz to retain a solid, smooth 60FPS with V-Sync on.

Remember to check “Per game profile” so it doesn’t set this on all your other games.

On LCD, you can leave V-Sync on, as with our settings it’ll hit 60FPS on average with few drops where it matters.

These settings should ensure the game still sticks around 60 FPS, any higher and you may see drops below that, and a bigger drain to your handheld’s battery.

The Chucky DLC for Dead by Daylight brought with it an update that also introduced FSR to the game. With the AMD tech enabled in the in-game settings, and the percentage pushed up to 100%, Dead by Daylight will run much better on your Valve handheld.

Better yet, if you started your Dead by Daylight journey on the Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5, you can now switch to playing the same account on Steam Deck. Developer Behaviour introduced a new cross-progression update, which you can easily set up through their website.

Dead by Daylight requires approximately 50GB of install space for your Steam Deck, which isn’t a lot by today’s standards. However, as regularly receives updates, its storage requirements could get scarily more demanding over time.

Picking up one of the best microSD cards will help ensure you have plenty of storage for Dead by Daylight and any Steam Deck game you want to play – especially if you haven’t yet picked up the 1TB OLED or upgraded the SSD.