‘Marvel Rivals’ plays great on Steam Deck, but do this first

On By Littum

Marvel Rivals, the free-to-play hero shooter with Overwatch clearly in the crosshairs, launched this week to a growing player base on Steam. It almost made it half a million fellow players, and some of them are no doubt enjoying it on their Steam Decks.

Yep! Despite the previous alpha and beta tests not running on Steam Deck, Marvel Rivals is officially supported on Valve’s handheld now (and here’s proof from a Marvel Games producer, via Liam at GamingOnLinux). Proof that a competitive team shooter can use anti-cheat and still run like a dream on Linux.

Fixed black screen during cutscenes on Marvel Rivals

However, there is one small hurdle that needs to be cleared. Developer NetEase and Valve are working on a bug that results in a dull black screen during cutscenes. The solution is to go into the game properties by tapping on selecting Marvel Rivals in your library and then selecting the gear icon. Once there, select Properties > Compatibility > check the box next to “Force the use of a specific Steam compatibility tool” and select “Proton Experimental.”

It’s possible that Proton Experimental is already set as your system-wide compatibility layer, but try this just to be sure. I can confirm that it fixes the problem.

Besides that, be sure to click “Confirm” if a warning about an unsupported OS pops up, and then “Continue” if you see a warning about an outdated graphics driver. (Hopefully NetEase will remove these warnings in a future patch – especially since it claims Deck is supported.)

Now you can play without missing the beautiful cutscenes, but if you want to choose the perfect graphics settings to achieve a higher frame rate, then continue reading.

Best Graphics Settings for Marvel Rivals on Steam Deck

Marvel Rivals is absolutely capable of 60FPS or higher on Steam Deck, but not without sacrificing some visual fidelity. Fortunately, this game not only features AMD FSR Frame Generation, but the implementation feels solid. Here are the settings I found were ideal if you want to reach 60FPS at the deck’s native resolution of 1280×800:

  • Anti-Aliasing and Super resolution Type: AMD FSR
  • Super Resolution Mode: Performance
  • Super Resolution Sharpness: 80
  • Frame Generation Mode: AMD FSR3 Frame Generation
  • V-Sync: Off
  • Graphics Quality: Low (or tap “Optimize”, which should set all embedded settings to Low)

You might notice a little flickering if you look closely enough – especially while panning the camera – but in the heat of battle you probably won’t be concerned about it. Other than that it played very smoothly for me during several public quick matches and mostly hovered near 60FPS! If you don’t care about using Frame Generation, you should still get around 40FPS.

After a number of recent popular releases doing so poorly on Steam Deck – including the recently released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – it’s refreshing to find Marvel Rivals officially supported and running so well. Good game!