Five Ways to Improve Your Steam Deck’s Battery Life

After the Nintendo Switch, the Steam Deck is arguably the most impressive handheld gaming device of the last decade. It brings Steam games, most of which were originally designed to run on Windows PCs, to a beautifully designed portable device. The only problem? Battery life can be tough on some games. If you’re having trouble staying charged, here are some tips to help.

When it comes to Steam Deck battery life, you’ll notice a lot of variability, even from one game to the next. AAA games that rely on high-end GPUs will tend to be power-hungry. On laptops or desktops, this isn’t usually a big deal, but on a Steam Deck — when these games are running at all — they can quickly burn through the battery.

So, while we have plenty of tips for getting the best battery life, it’s important to remember that some games just burn through your power no matter what. Luckily, SteamOS is already pretty energy efficient (at least compared to other operating systems ), and there are some handy tools that can help.

First, figure out what exactly is draining your battery.

There are a few common culprits of battery drain in games, and it’s helpful to understand them before looking for solutions. That’s because what works for one game with minimal impact on performance may make another game unplayable. With that in mind, here are a few key things that drain your battery:

• Hardware settings: The display on your Steam Deck is always a big drain on your battery, and turning down the brightness can help. Wireless radios like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth always use power even when you’re not using them, so you may want to turn them off occasionally if you don’t need them.

• Your refresh rate and FPS. Your Steam Deck needs to refresh the screen dozens of times per second, and for some games, that may be far more than necessary. 60–90 FPS may be necessary for a fast-paced game like Doom Eternal , but it’s overkill for Stardew Valley .

• Your CPU’s TDP: Thermal Design Power (or TDP) is a complex number, but it’s a shorthand way of saying how much power your CPU is using. In Steam Deck, you can limit this directly, which is a crude way to save battery, but it can sometimes help.

The most useful tool to help you diagnose the biggest battery drains is the Performance Overlay. Press the three-dot menu button while in-game and go to the Performance section, and you’ll see an option to enable this overlay. There are several levels of detail, ranging from a simple frame rate counter to real-time power consumption and temperature readings. The Performance tab is also where you’ll find some useful features that we’ll discuss (under Advanced View), so it’s a good idea to get to know this tab.

Review your game’s display settings

While Steam Deck has plenty of useful features for managing battery life, you’ll still find some of the best options in the game’s settings. Most games have presets for lowering graphics settings with one quick toggle — like switching from Ultra to Medium — and some have even more advanced settings.

This is especially important to keep in mind if you play Steam games on multiple devices. Some games will try to sync settings between them, which can result in your game being rendered at a higher resolution or frame rate than Steam Deck is capable of displaying.

Overall, here are a few settings to pay attention to:

• Resolution: The Steam Deck has a resolution of 1280×800, so unless you’re using an external monitor, there’s no point in setting the game to a higher resolution. Most games won’t let you set a higher resolution anyway, but it’s worth double-checking. You can also set a lower resolution for some games if you don’t need as much detail.

• Frame rate: Many games offer the option to limit the number of frames the game generates, even if your display is capable of displaying more. This can have a significant impact on battery life, especially for games that need to perform a lot of complex calculations (like graphically intensive shooters) for each new frame.

• Graphics Presets: If your game has a preset slider, try starting with the lowest preset and gradually increasing it to see how the game performs. The performance overlay can be a huge help here to see how much power your system is using at different presets. If your eye can’t tell the difference but your battery can, reset the settings.

You may have to play around to find the right balance for you, and it will vary greatly from game to game. Some games may require more graphical detail but fewer frames per second, while others will benefit from the exact opposite. Try a few options to see what works best.

Adjust the refresh rate and FPS using the Frame Limit slider.

As mentioned above, the number of times your game refreshes its screen per second can be a huge factor in draining your battery. This is affected by both your screen refresh rate (how many times the display physically updates the pixel you see) and your game’s frames per second (or FPS, the number of times the GPU generates a new frame per second). To complicate matters further, your refresh rate can affect input lag, so it’s important to find a delicate balance.

To make this easier, Steam Deck has a slider called Frame Limit that can impose a cap on the number of frames your game displays and set that balance for you. It automatically adjusts the refresh rate so that it is divided equally by the FPS cap, avoiding unnecessary (and asynchronous) updates while maintaining the highest possible refresh rate to reduce input lag.

This is a workaround that comes a bit later in the pipeline, and sometimes it’s better to adjust the game settings directly, but it simplifies a complex process. If you’d rather adjust the display refresh rate directly, you can toggle Disable Frame Limit and adjust the refresh rate from 45Hz to 90Hz directly. However, keep in mind that you may still need to adjust some game settings to avoid generating frames that your display will simply throw away.

Set the Thermal Design Power (TDP) limit if necessary

Adjusting a game’s graphics settings can tweak power consumption with the precision of a scalpel. By comparison, the TDP limit is a hammer. But even hammers have their uses. By design, the TDP slider in Steam Deck will impose a hard limit on how much power the CPU/GPU can draw from the battery. You can’t get much more direct battery savings than that.

The problem is that games are usually power hungry . And even games with really low settings usually don’t ask the user to decide how much power to consume. For some, especially graphically intensive games, setting a hard limit on TDP can result in a significant drop in performance or even game crashes.

Less demanding games, however, may benefit from playing with this setting. A useful rule of thumb is that if the game you’re playing is already struggling to maintain a consistent frame rate, try something else before touching the TDP. But for games like Stardew Valley , where you never care about frame rates, you might want to experiment with lowering the TDP limit to 10W or even 5W to see how well the game runs.

Of course, setting a TDP limit only matters if it’s lower than what your game originally used. This is another area where the performance overlay comes in handy. You can get an idea of ​​how much power your system is consuming while gaming, and use that to estimate how low the TDP limit should be.

Don’t forget about battery settings profiles for each game

In addition to all these settings, you can also set up game profiles to automatically change battery settings depending on what game you’re playing. I can’t recommend this feature enough, especially if you tend to play games with very different power requirements. There are few things more annoying than forgetting to set a low TDP limit for a simple game, then launching a more demanding game that strains to exceed that limit.

To use this, all you need to do is toggle one simple switch in the Performance tab. Turn on “Use a profile for each game,” and Steam Deck will automatically create a profile for each game you use. You can turn this switch off to revert to the default settings if you ever decide you prefer one persistent profile.

Remember that profiles only take into account the settings of the Steam Deck itself, not any game settings. But it’s still a handy tool. It can be difficult to keep track of all the different buttons and knobs you can tinker with to get extra battery life, but the Steam Deck manages to balance a ton of customization options with the simplicity of clear, easy-to-use tools to keep you playing longer.

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