After five years of early access, a brand-new Valheim update is here, with major performance overhauls for all platforms. While the game is still deep in the midst of early access, developer Iron Gate Studios has released a major engine overhaul that brings huge performance gains to the game.
“We want to thank everyone who has been a part of our journey and our community since then, whether you started playing on day one or have just been carried by the valkyrie for the first time,” the studio said in a recent blog post. “We greatly appreciate every single one of you, and we’re so glad to have you walk this path with us.”
For the game’s fifth anniversary, Iron Gate Studios has added a celebratory hat, early axes, a frosted sweetroll, a radial emote menu and new emotes, new hairstyles, and two new buildable garlands. However, more importantly, there’s a slew of performance updates.
Interestingly, playing the game on Valve’s beloved Steam Deck is now a massively improved experience. The game’s latest patch notes describe “improved graphics presets” which now use the Steam Deck’s native resolution of 1200×800 instead of the game’s prior resolution of 1366×768.
Additionally, Iron Gate has optimised preset settings for battery life as well as ensured that the game’s performance mode actually hits 60fps. While Valheim was always playable on the handheld, it did have some major framerate issues, which should now be largely resolved outside of high-intensity scenes.
Of course, this is all due to major performance improvements for all versions of the game as the team ported Valheim to a more efficient iteration of the Unity engine. For example, even the crusty old original Xbox One has been able to see both performance and visual improvements with this new patch, increasing the number of point lights and the quality of ambient occlusion within the soon-to-be-ancient console.
The update has seen massive CPU optimisation and memory management across all platforms with just one visual cutback to save on performance. From now on, the game will no longer reflect grass vegetation in environment reflections which is a very heavy effect to render.
All in all, Valheim has seen a huge upgrade in performance for everyone, but Steam Deck players are truly winning. As someone who has put a considerable number of hours into the game on Valve’s handheld, it could be quite rough, but it’s now running at a considerable clip, and should last long enough for a decent train ride. What more could we want?
For more Steam Deck coverage, read about why all PC developers should be trying to optimise for the handheld. Additionally, read about how Square Enix is using the beloved PC gaming handheld as a hardware target for its final entry in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy.
