TL;DR: Dishonored 2 runs at 40fps at Low-to-Medium settings without the fans turning on on the Steam Deck OLED. It looks more blurry than downgraded.
Dishonored 2 still does not seem to be much optimized overall, thus I found no satisfactory way to actually get this running at a stable 60fps with decent enough visuals. The good news is, with the setting I settled on, the power consumption is low enough to not let the fans kick on to audible levels, so the playing experience is great for mobile and/or quiet use. It will feel sluggish at first if you played Dishonored 1 right before it at 60fps, though. Find my settings below.
SteamOS Settings
Machine: Steam Deck OLED, WD _BLACK SN770 TB M.2 SSD
| Setting | Value |
| Frame Limiter | 40fps @ 80Hz |
| Allow Screen Tearing | Off |
| Half Rate Shading | Off |
| TDP Limit | 12 Watt |
| Manual GPU Frequency | Off |
| Scaling Filter | NIS (only relevant for external monitor) |
| Filter Sharpness | 5 |
Game Settings
| Setting | Value |
| Resolution | 1280×720 (16:9) |
| Display Mode | Fullscreen |
| FOV | 85 |
| Texture Details | Medium |
| Character Details | Medium |
| Water Details | Low |
| Environment Details | Medium |
| Shadow Quality | Medium |
| Decal Quality | Low |
| Fog Quality | Low |
| AA | TXAA 1x |
| TXAA Sharpness | 20 |
| Bloom | Yes |
| Motion Blur | Yes |
| Depth of Field | Yes |
| Blendenflecken | Yes |
| Lightshafts | Yes |
| Rat Shadows | Yes |
| Bloodflies Shadows | No |
| Vertical Sync | Off |
| Adaptive Resolution | Off |
| FPS Limit | 45 fps (yes, we locked to 40fps in SteamOS, but can’t hurt to tell the game where to go at max) |
| Triple Buffering | On |
| HBAO+ | Yes |
Details
During finding these settings, I noticed some things that might be good to know for other players:
- HBAO+ greatly adds to the atmospheric visuals, so I would always try to leave it on
- The water looks very decent even on low, so this appears to be an option to easily save some CPU performance
- One could try to go with 45fps, but I had the impression that fps exponentially hits performance of the Deck hard, so 40fps appeared to be the sweet spot
- With certain settings, the game will get an unbearable amount of input lag and perceived frame drops, while the Mango HUD readouts look generally good
- Adaptive resolution doesn’t look good at any setting to my eyes; 720p already is quite blurry with the post processing effects on, so I’d try to always go without adaptive resolution
- If you own and use a Steam Deck Dock regularly, I additionally opted for the 720p resolution for two reasons: 1) it saves some performance by rendering less pixels, and 2) when docking the Deck and vice versa, no switching of resolutions necessary
Hope any fellow Dishonored players finds these settings useful! Leave a comment below if you changed up stuff and found better ones. Cheers.