‘Marvel Rivals’ Plays Great On Steam Deck, But Do This First

Marvel Rivals, the free-to-play hero shooter with Overwatch blatantly in its crosshairs, launched this week to a surging player base on Steam. It reached nearly half a million concurrent players, and some of them are no doubt enjoying it on their Steam Decks.

Yep! Despite the earlier Alpha and Beta tests not running on Steam Deck, Marvel Rivals is officially supported on Valve’s handheld now (and here’s the 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.

Fix Black Screen During Cutscenes On Marvel Rivals

There’s one small hurdle to clear, however. Developer NetEase and Valve are working out a bug that results in a boring black screen during cutscenes. The solution is to go into the game’s properties by pressing by selecting Marvel Rivals in your library and then choosing the gear icon. Once you’re there, choose 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 in case. I can confirm it solves the problem.

Beyond 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sure to click “Confirm” if a warning about an unsupported OS pops up, and then “Continue” if you see a warning about an outdated graphics driver.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 the Deck is supported.)

Now you can play without missing those beautiful cutscenes, but if you want to dial in the perfect graphics settings to achieve a higher framerate, keep 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 to be ideal if you’re looking 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 Sharpening: 80
• Frame Generation Mode: AMD FSR3 Frame Generation
• V-Sync: Off
• Graphics Quality: Low (or hit “Optimize” which should set all nested settings to Low)

You may notice slight shimmering if you look closely enough — especially while panning the camera — but in the heat of battle you probably won’t be concerned by it. Aside from that, it played very smoothly for me during several public Quick Matches and mostly hovered near 60FPS! If you don’t care to use Frame Generation, you should still achieve roughly 40FPS.

After a string of recent popular releases that run so poorly on Steam Deck — including the newly released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — it’s refreshing to find Marvel Rivals officially supported and running this well. Happy gaming!