Atelier Yumia Steam Deck Impressions – PC Port Features, Recommended Settings, ROG Ally, and More

by

Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land  launches next week across Steam and consoles worldwide as the newest mainline Atelier series game. Ahead of its launch, I’ve been playing the Steam version on my PC handhelds to check out the features available in the final PC build, how it scales on Steam Deck and ROG Ally, and more. The Atelier series has been mostly fine on Steam Deck with some exceptions, and it has been interesting to see how the newest and most ambitious title in the series scales on Valve’s handheld.

Atelier Yumia PC graphics options

With Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends and the Secret Fairy, Koei Tecmo and Gust improved the quality of their PC ports quite a bit. That carries over into Atelier Yumia in all but one area. The graphics tab in the options menu lets you adjust resolution (540p to 4K), window mode (fullscreen, windowed, borderless), frame rate limit (30, 60, 120, 144, unlimited), toggle v-sync, overall graphics quality preset (custom, low, standard, high), texture quality (low, standard, high), shadow quality (low, standard, high), local reflections quality (low, standard, high), effect quality (low, standard, high), anti-aliasing (off, FXAA, TAA), depth of field (off, low, standard, high), toggle ambient occlusion, toggle bloom, toggle light shafts, draw distance (close, standard, long), grass draw distance (close, standard, long), grass density (low, standard, high), toggle motion blur, shadow draw distance (close, standard, long), model animation distance setting (close, standard, long), toggle volumetric fog, level of detail distance (close, standard, long), terrain quality (low, standard, high), toggle dynamic resolution, and use Intel XeSS. 



Having an upscaling option is great, but I’m not sure why only XeSS is included with no FSR on AMD hardware. In our preview, James commented on the lack of DLSS as well. If you use XeSS, the dynamic resolution is disabled as expected, but you can use XeSS set to ultra performance, performance, balanced, quality, ultra quality, ultra quality plus, or native anti-aliasing.

Atelier Yumia PC control options

On the control side, Atelier Yumia has support for controllers as well as keyboard and mouse gameplay. You can rebind the controls for both input options. This is notable because the console versions do not offer button rebinding as of this writing. On the flipside, the PC version of Atelier Yumia does not offer the DualSense adaptive trigger or haptic feedback support present in the PS5 version. The PC version also lets you swap the confirm and cancel buttons in Atelier Yumia. 



When using keyboard and mouse, you get appropriate button prompts and can also adjust the main and sub button for almost every action in-game across controls for the field, area map, combat, synthesis, building, and photo mode. 

Atelier Yumia Steam Deck performance

Atelier Yumia on Steam supports Steam Cloud and runs at 16:9 aspect ratio resolutions only. When launching it for the first time, I initially thought it would run without issues on Steam Deck after the promising opening area, but that prologue location was much smaller in scope than what followed. When getting into the open world within an hour of playing, I realized this was a 30fps target game for Steam Deck. In fact, if you play at the “Standard” graphics preset, Atelier Yumia runs between 24 and 35fps at worst. This setting also uses XeSS balanced. 






Note: Some of the screenshots have been edited to blank out any potential spoilers.

Given how demanding the game is on consoles as well, I wasn’t expecting to get 60fps, but you will need to play with upscaling to get close to a locked 30fps on the standard preset. Aside from performance, the UI scales well and the game generall feels very good on the Deck. I mapped some of the buttons to the back paddles as well. I also have access to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch versions, which I cover in a separate article that I recommend reading for context of how the game scales across high end and hybrid consoles.

Atelier Yumia Steam Deck recommended settings

My recommended settings will cover two aspects in Atelier Yumia on Steam Deck. The first relates to the non-graphics parts of the game. I recommend increasing the vertical and horizontal camera movement speed. I set both to the maximum and disabled camera autocorrect and camera shake. I then set the text size to three for subtitles to make them more readable on the handheld screen. The final recommendation I have outside graphics is increasing the various volume sliders to their maximum or just below. The default audio output seems soft if you play using the Deck’s own speakers (this is a bigger issue on the LCD model). 

Getting to the Atelier Yumia recommended graphics options for Steam Deck, you have two options: aiming for a locked 30fps or a mostly stable 30fps with better image quality. For the former, I recommend playing at the low preset with XeSS set to balanced and 720p. This results in a softer image, but performance is very stable in the open field, near big buildings, in towns with a lot of NPCs, and during combat in the time I put into the game on Steam Deck. 

To achieve a smooth 30fps gaming experience with occasional drops in heavy-duty regions, I suggest selecting the standard preset and lowering the shadow settings to low. Additionally, set XeSS to ‘balanced’ and run the game at 720p resolution. Remember to cap the frame rate at 30fps because the standard preset keeps it at 60fps by default. If you prefer clearer visuals at the expense of some settings while maintaining the same frame rate target, choose the low preset, 720p, and set XeSS to ‘quality’. Keep in mind that both the low and standard presets utilize XeSS balanced anti-aliasing, whereas the high preset uses XeSS native anti-aliasing by default.

If you aren’t a fan of upscaling at all, Atelier Yumia runs around 24fps in its more demanding areas on Steam Deck at a native 720p and the low preset. Even the open area outside the Atelier dropped to the mid 20s often without any action on screen. This is one of the early parts of the game that is very demanding though. Using these settings in later locations resulted in better performance including it hitting the 40s, but the frame rate is too unstable to aim for a 40fps experience with decent visuals right now. Just for testing purposes, I tried running Atelier Yumia at the high preset and 720p. The end result is around 15-18fps in the open areas without upscaling and around 21-22fps with XeSS native anti-aliasing. 

Also just to see how much I could push the frame rate up, I set it to 540p and XeSS ultra performance on Steam Deck. I saw it go between 40 and 70fps with this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Atelier Yumia ends up with a Steam Deck Playable rating from Valve since there is some text in the menus that might be too small for the Verified rating. 

Atelier Yumia ROG Ally performance impressions and recommended settings

In its current state, Atelier Yumia is a bit rougher on ROG Ally. I say this not because of the performance, but stability. I regularly ran into the game crashing when changing graphics settings while in-game. This doesn’t happen on Steam Deck at all or when doing the changes on the title screen on ROG Ally. Barring that, I was curious to see how I could push Atelier Yumia on ASUS’ handheld. My ROG Ally is set to use 5GB VRAM and I did my testing in the 25W turbo mode. 

When playing on the standard preset at 1080p (capped to 30fps) and shadows set to low, Atelier Yumia runs at a mostly solid 30fps with some drops to 27fps in busier moments. The early stress test area of the Atelier building saw dips to 26fps as well. To get a 30fps when running at 1080p, I recommend using XeSS set to performance rather than balanced and the shadows set to low.






Since the Steam Deck isn’t really capable of running Atelier Yumia at 60fps, I wondered about the ROG Ally. Even when running at 720p, XeSS ultra performance, and the low preset, a locked 60fps is not possible in Atelier Yumia on ROG Ally. It drops to the 40s often. Given how it runs on ROG Ally in the 25W mode, I ended up playing more on my Steam Deck for stability and better battery life. In fact, I even pushed it down to 540p and tried the same settings, and it dropped below 60fps during exploration. I recommend playing at a mix of the standard and low preset at 1080p with a 30fps cap for the best experience on the ROG Ally right now.

Atelier Yumia is a gorgeous game that I’ve enjoyed playing a lot across different platforms. I hope the crashing can get resolved in patches. It is worth noting that Chao ran into a lot of crashes as well on an RDNA 3 GPU, but James didn’t at all on an RDNA 2 laptop or Steam Deck. I didn’t run into any crashing on my Steam Deck LCD and OLED models either. I’m not sure what the cause is for this, but I wanted to make a note of the crashing we ran into on specific hardware. I recommend trying out the demo that will launch in a few days to see how it runs on your setup as well. 

Read More

2025-03-15 19:34