The game being in Early Access it is not fully optimized and performance keeps changing over the patches. It remains playable on the Steam Deck. If you just want the smoothest experience, just turn FSR on as shown below and put all the other settings on Lowest preset. This guide highlights a compromise between looks and most-of-the-time 30 FPS. At the time of writing, the game plays and looks better in handheld mode and gets about just under 2 hours of battery life. This is due to the lower rendered resolution so we have the headroom to use higher settings, plus the Steam Deck screen being lower resolution so it just looks crisper (rendering resolution in closer to screen resolution). Palworld's current performance feels like it will get better with optimization, so we just have to wait for that to see how this goes, fingers crossed for more graphical headroom after optimization so we can play at least on Medium, 720p rendered and upscaled to 1080p at 45 FPS on an external display at some point.

Right-Click on Palworld in the library and choose Properties. In General, add these Launch Options to turn on FSR.

gamescope -w 1129 -h 635 -W 1920 -H 1080 -S fit -F fsr --fsr-sharpness 0 --framerate-limit 30 -f --force-grab-cursor --mangoapp -- %command%

• -w and -h is rendered resolution, change to 1280 and 720 respectively (720p) for a more crisp image at Upscaled 1080p. I would recommend putting this to 1920 and 1080 (1080p) if upscaled resolution is 1440p but every other graphical settings on lowest settings in this case.
  
• -W and -H is upscaled resolution, change to 2560 and 1440 respectively for 1440p monitors
  
• mangoapp is the CPU, GPU, FPS overlay, feel free to remove it if you don't want the overlay.

Note: If you have these launch options then the game will not launch in handheld Big Picture mode, only in Desktop Mode.




Note: I will try to keep updating when the game gets more (or less) optimised.

p.s. Some weather conditions just tank the FPS to 20. Only thing that stabilises it back to 30 FPS at FSR upscaled 1080p seems to be lowering all graphics settings (putting the game to lowest graphical preset).

p.s. Looking in the distance drops the FPS to 20 too, no matter the view/draw distances.

It is possible to hit 45 FPS in the game, however as it is not yet fully optimized FPS fluctuates a lot and it is not a good experience. So until the game is more optimized, here are the settings I used to get a mostly stable 30 FPS in handheld mode.

# In-Game Settings




# Steam Deck Settings

Disable Frame Limit, Allow Tearing, Half Rate Shading are OFF.

# Additional Comment
Should be able to hit 45 FPS on slighter higher settings as the game gets more optimised. For now if you want to hit an unstable 45 FPS, but 45 FPS still at base and when looking at non-intensive scenes then use these settings:



Don't forget to put it at 45 FPS (45 Hz) in the Steam settings for Frame Limit.