Marvel Rivals, the free-to-play hero shooter with Overwatch in its sights, launched this week on Steam to a growing player base. It reached almost half a million concurrent players, and some of them are undoubtedly enjoying it on their Steam decks.

Yes! Although the previous alpha and beta tests aren’t running on Steam Deck, Marvel Rivals is now officially supported on Valve’s handheld (and here’s the proof from a Marvel Games producer, via Liam at GamingOnLinux). Proof that a competitive team shooter game can take advantage of anti-cheat and still run like a dream on Linux.

Fix black screen during cutscenes in Marvel Rivals

However, there is a small hurdle that needs to be overcome. Developers NetEase and Valve are fixing a bug that results in a boring black screen in cutscenes. The solution is to go into the game’s properties by clicking on “Marvel Rivals” in your library and then selecting the gear icon. Once you’re there, go to Properties > Compatibility > check the box next to “Force use a specific Steam compatibility tool” and select “Proton Experimental.”

It’s possible that Proton Experimental is already set as your system-wide compatibility level, but try it just in case. I can confirm that it solves the problem.

Additionally, be sure to click Confirm if you see an unsupported operating system warning, and then click Next if you see an outdated graphics driver warning. (Hopefully NetEase will remove these warnings in a future patch – especially since the deck is claimed to be supported.)

Now you can play without missing the beautiful cutscenes, but if you want to set the perfect graphics settings to achieve a higher frame rate, read on.

Best graphics settings for Marvel Rivals on Steam Deck

Marvel Rivals certainly manages 60 FPS or more on Steam Deck, but not without sacrificing visual fidelity. Luckily, not only does this game feature AMD FSR Frame Generation, but the implementation feels solid. Here are the settings that I think are ideal if you want to achieve 60 FPS at the deck’s native resolution of 1280×800:

• Anti-Aliasing and Super Resolution Type: AMD FSR
• Super Resolution Mode: Performance
• Super Resolution Sharpening: 80
• Frame generation mode: AMD FSR3 frame generation
• V-Sync: Off
• Graphics Quality: Low (or click Optimize, which should set all nested settings to Low)

If you look closely – especially when panning the camera – you may notice a slight flicker, but in the heat of the moment it probably won’t worry you. Apart from that, it ran very smoothly for me in several public quick matches and hovered around 60 FPS for the most part! If you don’t want to use frame generation, you should still get around 40 FPS.

After a number of recent popular releases doing so poorly on Steam Deck – including the newly released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – it’s refreshing to see Marvel Rivals officially supported and doing so well. Have fun playing!