Resonite-On-Steam-Deck

This is a community maintained list of stuff you can do to improve using Resonite on the Steam Deck. This list will change over time as needed, feel free to give suggestions or corrections by opening an issue.

Table of Contents

Getting Started

• Known Issues
• Controls
• Proton

Further Improvements

• Performance & Battery Life

Advanced

• Headless Client
• lsfg-vk
• Mods
• VR

Getting Started

Known Issues

#5473 - Resonite does not launch correctly when installed to an SD card.

Controls

I've made a layout (creatively named "Raidriar's Layout") you can use that should cover the majority of common controls, I have some buttons left over as I plan on expanding the layout but it should remain mostly similar to how it is now.

There are more layouts the community has made and I recommend checking other's out to see if another one works for you better. This guide for now will be focusing on just the one I'm making.

• A - Jump
• B - Crouch
• X - Secondary
• Y - Mute
• L1 - 3rd Person
• R1 - UI Focus Mode
• L2 - Right Click
• R2 - Left Click/Primary
• L4 - Slow Walk/Slow Fly
• R4 - Delete Held Item
• L5 - Instant Photo
• R5 - Timed Photo
• Pause - Dashboard
• Select - Context Menu
• DPad Up - Scale Up/Zoom In/Scroll Up
• DPad Down - Scale Down/Zoom Out/Scroll Down
• DPad Left - Hold to rotate held item with Right Joystick/Right Trackpad
• DPad Right - Hold to pan in UI Focus Mode with Right Joystick/RightTrackpad
• Right Trackpad - Finer mouse controls
• Left Trackpad - ToolTip Radial Menu

In the event you cannot download the layout through Steam directly, you can download it from this repo by right clicking (left trigger) the following link and clicking Save Link As...

Raidriar's Layout

The file will need to be placed in this directory:

/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Steam Controller Configs/[your Steam ID]/config/2519830

Proton

For the best compatibility, use the latest stable Proton versions, such as Proton 9. Proton GE provides little benefit for Resonite, especially on Steam Deck, but it provides better video support over official Proton versions so it may be prefered.

All tested & working Proton versions:

• Official Proton Versions:
  • Proton 9
  • Proton 10
  • Proton Experimental
• 3rd Party Proton Versions:
  • Proton CachyOS Native
  • Proton CachyOS SLR
  • Proton GE 9
  • Proton GE 10

Official proton versions are accessible directly in Steam, but 3rd party ones can be installed through any of the following methods:

• ProtonUp-Qt, which can be installed through discover in desktop mode
• The Wine Cellar plugin for decky loader
• Manually place Proton versions into /home/deck/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d/

Further Improvements

Performance & Battery Life

This section will give recommended settings for Resonite and for the options in the Steam Deck's Quick Access Menu, You can go even lower then what's recommended here but I'm aiming to preserve visuals while still helping performance, feel free to go lower but keep in mind what you're doing in reducing the settings further.

DISCLAIMER: I modify my own Steam Deck with 3rd party tools and hardware modifications to improve performance, my Steam Deck's performance is not indicative of a stock Steam Deck's performance, but what I mention here should be generally applicable.

Launch Options

LD_PRELOAD="" DXVK_CONFIG="dxgi.maxFrameRate = 60; dxgi.maxDeviceMemory = 512;" %command% -SkipIntroTutorial

• LD_PRELOAD="" is an environment variable used to load separate libraries in place of the libraries the applications would try to run. In this case, this prevents a library from being loaded by Steam which causes a stuttering issue with keyboard/mouse input after prolonged usage. This is mostly beneficial for use in Desktop Mode.
• DXVK_CONFIG="dxgi.maxFrameRate = 60; dxgi.maxDeviceMemory = 512;" Has 2 parts to it:
  • dxgi.maxFrameRate = 60 is a DXVK config value which specifies a framerate limit at a lower level than setting it in Steam or Resonite. Here's a couple of recommended values:
    • 60 for smoothness (you will rarely hit 60 under normal usage).
    • 40 for 40/80 hz refresh rate power saving.
    • 30 for general power saving.
  • dxgi.maxDeviceMemory = 512 is a config value for DXVK that tells dx11 that it has 512 MB of VRAM, this will not prevent Resonite from using more than 512 MB, but it can help keep VRAM usage lower.
    • If you're using Cryo Utilities (shown below), you can try 2048 instead. Feel free to experiment with different values.
• %command% is what steam uses to figure out where to put launch args, so you can insert environment variables and launch arguments before and after the actual command to run the game.
• -SkipIntroTutorial does what it says on the tin. This makes bootup a lot faster after the first time or after clearing the database.

Quick Access Menu

• Disable Frame Limit - On

• TDP Limit - 10W

• Manual GPU Clock - Off

• Scaling Filter - Sharp

  • To be able to upscale, you will need to force the game resolution in Resonite by disabling fullscreen and setting a Window Resolution lower than the display's resolution

Resonite Settings

NOTICE: Settings labeled with (Synced) will be cloud synced.

User Interface < Quick Photo Capture

• Encode Format - WebP

User Interface < Cursor Settings

• Base cursor size (Synced) - 0.05
  • Change as needed, value was picked based on trying to make it clearly visible without covering too much of the screen

Profile < Favorites

• Load cloud home on startup - Off

Graphics < Texture Quality

• Relative Texture Size - Full Size
  • Quarter Size recommended when #5314 is fixed
• Maximum Texture Size - Tex 1K
• Limit Texture Above Resolution - 512
• Texture Filtering - Anisotropic
• Anisotropic Level - 4

Graphics < Post Processing

• Motion Blur Intensity (Synced) - 0%
• Bloom Intensity (Synced) - 50%
  • Keep in mind - you may want to at least keep bloom on as it has little improvement when disabling, it additionally has a practical use in content creation and stuff may be designed around it.
• Ambient Occlusion (AO) Intensity (Synced) - 0%
• Screen Space Reflections (Synced) - Off
• Antialiasing (AA) (Synced) - SMAA

Graphics < Rendering Quality

• Per Pixel Lights - 4
• Shadow Cascades - None
• Shadow Resolution - Low
• Shadow Distance - 64.00
• Skin Weights - Two Bones

Graphics < Resolution

• Fullscreen - Off
  • Upscaling won't work if this is enabled, but you can use it as an upscaling toggle of sorts
• Window Resolution - x 1024 y 640
  • 1280x720 for docks
  • 1024x640 for text readibility
  • 960x600 for battery life
• Fullscreen Resolution - x 1280 y 800

Graphics < Desktop Render Settings

• Field of view - 70
• VSync - Off
• Limit framerate when in background - On
  • Only relevant when using Desktop Mode
• Maximum background framerate - 10

Graphics < Gaussian Splat Rendering Quality

• Quality Preset - Very Low
• Minimum Locally Compressed Quality - High
  • This is the highest amount of compression available. This alleviates the cost of compressing splats locally at the cost of higher VRAM usage.
• Sorting Mega-operations per camera - 1.00
  • Gaussian Splats are incredibly GPU bound and will bring the deck to a crawl, you practically have to set this as low as possible to prevent Resonite from becoming unusable while one is being renderered.

Integrations < Steam Integration

• Save Screenshots - Off
  • This prevents saving photos twice

Misc < OS Settings

• Keep original screenshot format - On
  • This prevents photos being re-encoded when saved

3rd Party Tools (use at your own risk)

• Cryo Utilities

  • RAM, VRAM, Swap, and storage optimizations.
  • For now, avoid resizing Swap with Cryo Utils, SteamOS 3.6 enables Zram which breaks some functions within Cryo Utils.

• Powertools

  • decky loader plugin that exposes more options to tweak performance.
  • For most users I'd only recommend this for the CPU governor options (the powersave option can extend the battery life quite a bit)

Advanced

Headless Client

With the release of the big performance update, running the headless client is now incredibly easy. Since the dotnet runtime is provided for you simply by running Resonite, you can use it to also run the headless client without installing anything extra.

To run the headless client on the Steam Deck, do the following:

1. Change the branch in Steam to the headless branch

• Requires the appropriate Patreon/Subscription tier to access it
• Send /headlessCode to the Resonite bot in Resonite to get the code for the Steam Branch

2. Run Resonite normally at least once
3. Open a terminal and cd into the headless install directory, with a default install you'd run:

cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Resonite/Headless/

4. Run the headless client with the provided dotnet install like so:

../dotnet-runtime/dotnet Resonite.dll

If it launches without errors, you can safely shut it down with the shutdown command and configure the client like any other headless setup. Read the headless configuration page on the Resonite Wiki if you haven't already.

Now you can run the headless client on a Steam Deck. Here's a template for a script you could create to run the headless easier:

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Resonite/Headless
../dotnet-runtime/dotnet Resonite.dll

lsfg-vk

lsfg-vk is a project to bring the frame generation from Lossless Scaling to Linux, which includes SteamOS. This can allow you to reduce CPU usage by cutting the framerate in half and making the GPU fill in the gaps. In general this should reduce overall load and improve battery life with visual artifacts and smearing as the tradeoff.

The lsfg-vk installation guide goes over installing for SteamOS, so follow that guide and then do the following:

1. Open the lsfg-vk configuration ui and create a new profile with the following:

• Profile name - Resonite
• Multiplier - 2
• Flow Scale - 100
• Performance Mode - On

2. Set the following to your Resonite launch arguments:

LSFG_PROCESS=Resonite DXVK_CONFIG="dxgi.maxFrameRate = 60;" %command%

• Set dxgi.maxFrameRate to half of your target framerate, such as 30 for 60 hz, 45 for 90 hz, etc

3. Optionally, if the input latency increase is too much, try changing this setting:

• Present Mode - Mailbox
  • This will improve input latency at the cost of potentially reduced smoothness

If you added the recommended launch arguments earlier in this guide, your arguments should look something like this:

LD_PRELOAD="" LSFG_PROCESS=Resonite DXVK_CONFIG="dxgi.maxFrameRate = 60; dxgi.maxDeviceMemory = 512;" %command% -SkipIntroTutorial

lsfg-vk should now work in Resonite. If you'd like to disable it, you can remove LSFG_PROCESS from the launch arguments or remove the profile from your config.

Mods

Mods in Resonite offer a lot of fixes, tweaks, and quality of life additions, but are by no means required.

Installation via GUI

The mod manager Resolute can download and install Resonite Mod Loader (RML) as well as mods for RML, and is the simplest way to use mods on a Steam Deck.

Setting up Resolute

1. Switch to Desktop Mode

2. From the releases page, download the .AppImage

3. Open Resolute

4. Proceed with the initial setup and enter the install location to Resonite if it's not auto detected correctly. Default install directory for Resonite:

/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Resonite

Resolute is now setup to run and install RML and mods for RML, but more can be done to increase ease of access. It can also update itself when new releases come out.

Using Resolute in Game Mode

1. Move the app to a folder such as /home/deck/Applications or wherever you'd like to store it

2. Rename it, I'd suggest just naming it "resolute.AppImage"

3. Right click (left trigger) the file and click Add to Steam

Resolute will now be available in Game Mode.

If you need to manually update it, you'll want to revisit the releases page and download the latest AppImage, replace the previous AppImage with the new file, and rename it to "resolute.AppImage" (or whatever it was named before) so nothing needs to be reconfigured in Steam.

Manual Installation

Resonite Mod Loader's and Monkey Loader's installation guides can be followed normally on the Steam Deck

Resonite Mod Loader Installation

Monkey Loader Installation

Recommended Mods

Unless stated otherwise, mods listed here are available through Resolute

• CherryPick - Simple component and protoflux searching

  • Helps remove the need to navigate the component/protoflux browser with the Deck's controls.

• DuplicateFix - Makes it so duplicated items maintain references between each other.

  • General nice to have but this issue is a lot more frustrating to deal with on the Deck's controls.

• DynamicDesyncHelper - Dynamically adjusts the LNL Window Size to avoid desyncing.

  • While intended for generally worse network conditions, this can be helpful in cases where there's bad wifi or a weak cellular connection to support the Deck's portability.

• EmpoweredImageEncoding - Configure Resonite image encoding & quick photo quality parameters

  • Can help reduce the resource usage for taking Quick Photos at the cost of increased network usage for uploading photos.

• FasterFirstCasts - Faster first node overload casting by only searching a node list

  • Speeds up initial casts to make protoflux a bit smoother to work with on Deck.

• FastSync - Improves compression speed for sync messages.

  • This reduces a significant amount of overhead for session traffic on the Deck, for the cost of a 1-5% increase in outbound network traffic.

• LinuxAudioBufferThing - Minimizes resource usage in the audio thread.

  • This significantly reduces power consumption and temperatures, especially under low power/idle workloads.
  • This mod is not available through Resolute
  • This mod does not provide release binaries, so I have provided a build here

• LiteStreams - Reduces outbound network traffic.

  • Similar in use case to DynamicDesyncHelper, but this specifically reduces outbound traffic for cases where the upload speed of a network is bad.

• HostCrashGuard - Makes Resonite Crash Less! Fixes #2746 (Decimal DIV/0), #2681 (Host timeout), #1646 (Invalid components)

  • I believe this explains itself.

• InspectorScroll - Allows scrolling inspectors (and other ui panels) using your thumbstick / touchpad.

  • Can improve UI navigation, and allow controls like scrolling incrementally with the D-Pad when using my controller layout.

• ResoniteIkCulling - Disables the IK of Users who are behind you or far away. Includes IK throttling.

  • Can improve performance in populated sessions under certain situations.

• ResoniteModSettings - Adds a dash screen to edit mod configs

  • Adds an in game menu for configuring mods, only needed if you're only using RML.

VR

Yes, this is coming soon :)