Steam Deck Best Settings Exo Rally Championship: Fixing 20-30 FPS Drops

To find the Steam Deck best settings Exo Rally Championship players should start by locking the refresh rate to 40Hz and setting AMD FSR to 'Balanced'. Exbleative’s hardcore sci-fi sim calculates complex suspension physics and procedural terrain generation in real-time. Because of this heavy CPU load, the default graphics profile causes severe 20-30 FPS stuttering during planetary storms and hazard events. By balancing the APU's power distribution and offloading texture memory, you can secure a perfectly paced, battery-efficient handheld rally experience.

Exbleative, the Australian developer behind the atmospheric hit Exo One, pivoted sharply with Exo Rally Championship. Instead of smooth, relaxing flight, this game is a brutal, physics-driven off-road simulation. Your vehicle simulates realistic tire models, drive trains, and a punishing damage system. When you drop frames during a massive jump, you miscalculate your thruster burst, leading to a destroyed suspension upon landing. Frame pacing here is strictly gameplay-critical, not just a visual luxury.

01

The 40 FPS Target Configurationtag

Securing a flat frame time graph is mandatory in a game where a single mistimed input will total your rover. The Steam Deck’s 40Hz refresh rate provides a 25-millisecond frame time—the exact sweet spot for high-speed input response without melting the handheld's APU.

Always disable the in-game dynamic resolution scaler and rely on AMD's FSR 2.2 instead.

Core Display and Resolutiontag

Do not let the Unity engine guess your resolution targets. Lock the native output and use external upscaling to maintain visual clarity on the 800p screen.

• Display Resolution: 1280x800
• Refresh Rate: 40Hz (via SteamOS Quick Access Menu)
• Framerate Limit: 40 FPS
• V-Sync: Off (Let SteamOS handle the frame pacing)
• AMD FSR 2.2: Balanced

Advanced Graphics Overridestag

Keep Terrain Deformation at Medium to preserve gameplay accuracy, but sacrifice atmospheric effects.

Terrain deformation isn't just cosmetic in this game; it dictates the friction coefficient of your tires. Turning it to Low makes the mud and alien gravel look entirely flat, causing you to misjudge traction and spin out. Conversely, high-end atmospheric effects cripple the CPU during procedural generation.

• Texture Quality: Medium
• Shadow Quality: Low (High shadows bottleneck the CPU when rendering 10-square-kilometer stages)
• Terrain Deformation: Medium (Critical for reading the track surface)
• Volumetric Fog: Low
• Post-Processing: Low
• RCS Thruster Particles: Medium

02

Eliminating Severe Weather Stutterstag

Even with optimized in-game settings, Exo Rally Championship suffers from heavy traversal stutter when streaming large chunks of the environment. This bottleneck peaks during the devastating "lava bomb replays" and severe planetary storms. The root cause is the game engine swapping texture data out of the Steam Deck's default unified memory allocation.

The 4GB UMA Frame Buffer Adjustmenttag

Increasing the UMA frame buffer to 4GB stops the procedural terrain generation from choking the system RAM.

By default, the Steam Deck allocates only 1GB of VRAM, dynamically requesting more from the system RAM as needed. Exo Rally Championship requests data too fast during extreme weather, causing the 20-30 FPS drops.

1. Power down the Steam Deck entirely.
2. Hold the Volume Up button and press the Power button to boot into the BIOS.
3. Navigate to Setup Utility > Advanced > UMA Frame Buffer Size.
4. Change the value from 1G to 4G.
5. Save and exit.

This forces the APU to reserve 4GB of VRAM exclusively for graphics, entirely smoothing out the frame drops during lava bomb replays and heavy atmospheric loading.

Proton Experimental Configurationtag

Valve's default Proton layer handles the game's engine reasonably well, but forcing Proton Experimental resolves a known audio desync issue that occurs when syncing times to the asynchronous multiplayer leaderboards. Highlight the game in your Steam library, open Properties > Compatibility, and check the box to force the use of Proton Experimental.

03

Battery Life vs. Visuals: The 11-Watt Profiletag

The career mode, heavily inspired by real-world endurance events like the Dakar and Baja rallies, features massive stages that can take upwards of 15 to 20 minutes to complete. Running the APU at maximum power will drain an LCD Steam Deck in under 80 minutes, practically guaranteeing a dead battery mid-stage.

Planet-Specific Power Drawtag

Cap the TDP limit at 11 Watts to guarantee at least 2.5 hours of playtime on an OLED model.

Navigating the barren salt flats of early moons draws significantly less power than the dense atmospheres of later planets. For example, the "Dhool dust storms" push the GPU clock to its absolute limit. By locking the "11-Watt TDP limit" and manually fixing the GPU clock to 1200 MHz via the Quick Access Menu, you cap the "16-18W total system power" draw. This prevents the battery from hemorrhaging power during extreme weather spikes while maintaining the 40 FPS lock, ensuring you get a reliable "2.5 hours of playtime on an OLED" model.

04

Controller and Gyro Setup for RCS Thrusterstag

Exo Rally Championship utilizes a highly realistic drive train simulation. Mid-air corrections rely entirely on fuel-limited RCS thrusters, natively mapped to the right stick for pitch and roll. On a standard controller, taking your thumb off the face buttons to adjust your pitch mid-jump leads to fatal crashes upon landing.

Steam Input Custom Grip Mappingstag

Map the back grips to handle gear shifts and thruster boosts so your thumbs never leave the primary steering sticks.

• Map the L4 / R4 back grips to manual Gear Shifts (Shift Down / Shift Up).
• Assign the L5 / R5 triggers to the RCS Thruster Boost.
• Use the Right Stick exclusively for mid-air Pitch/Roll.

This layout allows you to downshift, fire your boost, and angle the rover's nose simultaneously during a blind crest jump.

Deadzone Calibration for Realistic Physicstag

The default analog stick deadzones in SteamOS are often too wide for the micro-adjustments required on exoplanetary gravel. Open the Steam Input controller settings and reduce the "SteamOS deadzones to 4000". This removes the twitchy, center-heavy steering feel and stabilizes the suspension physics during high-speed drifts.

Gyro Steering for High-Speed Salt Flatstag

You can map the Deck's gyroscope to the left stick for horizontal steering. By setting the gyro activation strictly to 'Left Stick Touch', you can make micro-adjustments on high-speed salt flats simply by tilting the console. This drastically reduces oversteer when traveling at 150 km/h, simulating the precision of a racing wheel.

05

Customizing the Rover for Handheld Legibilitytag

Apply high-contrast paint jobs in the garage so the vehicle pops against the martian rust red environments.

The telemetry data and ride height indicators can be difficult to read on the 800p screen. While Exbleative has not added a dedicated UI scaling slider yet, you can use the SteamOS built-in magnifier (Steam + L1) to quickly check your rover's fuel weight and tire quality between waypoints. Furthermore, when tumbling down a crater, losing track of your rover's orientation is a death sentence. Use Neon Blue or Bright Yellow paint schemes to maintain visual tracking during chaotic flips.

06

Frequently Asked Questionstag

Does Exo Rally Championship support cloud saves between PC and Steam Deck? Yes. The game fully supports Steam Cloud saves. You can pause a 20-hour career mode run on your desktop rig and seamlessly resume the exact same stage on your handheld while traveling.

Can I play asynchronous multiplayer offline? You can complete all stages completely offline. The game will cache your stage times locally and automatically sync them to the global asynchronous leaderboards the next time your Steam Deck connects to Wi-Fi.

Why does the stage editor run poorly on the Deck? The in-game stage editor allows creators to build custom rally courses spanning up to 10 square kilometers. Compiling these massive procedural maps requires heavy CPU processing that exceeds the Deck's APU capabilities. It is highly recommended to build custom stages on a desktop PC and simply download them to play on the handheld.

How do I fix the unreadable UI text? Until a dedicated UI scaling patch is released, rely on the SteamOS magnifier (Steam + L1) to check your tire degradation and fuel weight before starting a new sector.