Buried in the Star Wars Zero Company Steam FAQ is one of the more candid admissions a publisher has made about PC performance this year, and it went up before the game launched.
Answering a question about Steam Deck verification, the developers wrote that they recently removed “native” from the game’s PC specifications to be fully transparent ahead of launch, because hitting the recommended target of 60 FPS at 1440p is best accomplished using the game’s default recommended setting: TSR, or vendor upscalers DLSS and FSR. In plain terms, the recommended spec sheet describes an upscaled image, and the studio decided to say so rather than let buyers find out.
Credit where it is due. That is more honest than the industry norm, which is to publish a native-implying spec and let reviewers discover the gap. It is also a fairly grim data point about where Unreal Engine 5 performance targets have landed in 2026.
The Steam Deck outcome is not ambiguous. Testing from Steam Deck HQ found the game struggling to hit 30 FPS at the lowest possible settings, averaging roughly 18 to 22 FPS in combat and hub areas, with the visuals badly compromised at those settings and no way to claw it back. Lossless scaling frame generation made it worse, because the base frame rate is too low for frame generation to build on. RPG Site reported drops into the mid-teens even at 25 percent render scale, and pointed at memory as a likely culprit given the Deck’s 16GB shared pool against a minimum spec that already asks for 16GB of system RAM.
On the desktop side, NVIDIA shipped Game Ready driver 616.56 on August 26 with day-one DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation support for the game, alongside Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy and Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. TechPowerUp’s 35-GPU benchmark went up yesterday and is the number to check before you buy.
Upscaling as a default is a legitimate engineering choice, and DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution looks good. Zero Company is a turn-based tactics game where reading grid markers, cover indicators, and Holotable text is the entire interaction model. Push FSR down to Performance to chase frames and that information becomes unreadable. A blurry shooter is annoying. A blurry tactics game is broken.
If you are on a 16GB card at 1440p you will be fine. If you are on 8GB or a handheld, wait for patches. And if you want the wider context on why 8GB has stopped being enough, the Steam Hardware Survey crossed that line this month for the first time.
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