Subnautica 2 and Forza Horizon 6 Get Steam Deck Verified Status Ahead of Launch

Despite recent leaks of both Subnautica 2 and Forza Horizon 6, little has been said online about either game running on a Valve Steam Deck, even though Forza’s Playground Games promised Steam Deck and ASUS ROG handheld compatibility when it revealed the minimum hardware requirements for the game. Now, on the eve of Subnautica 2’s May 14 Early Access launch and the review embargo date for Forza Horizon 6, both games have been officially Steam Deck verified by Valve. While there are still questions about the performance of both games, it’s yet another sign that two popular games from sizeable studios are being optimized for Valve’s hardware—a positive indicator for the Steam Machine’s playable library, too.

This means that both games have been tested for performance, UI scaling on the small, low-resolution display of the Steam Deck, and compatibility with both the Deck’s controller and the Proton compatibility layer that SteamOS uses to run Windows games on Linux. It’s unclear what sort of performance or resolution we can expect from either game on the Steam Deck, but Subnautica 2 officially calls for a minimum of an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 or AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT and an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 or Intel Core i5-8400 CPU—those minimum specs will only grant you 30 FPS at 1080p and low quality, however, so Steam Deck gamers will seemingly be relying on tech like FSR to get reasonable frame rates. The same questions surround the handheld frame rates of Forza Horizon 6, since the published minimum hardware specifications make no mention of what quality and frame rates will be possible on the Steam Deck or ASUS ROG consoles.