Steam Deck: 7 Best Tips to Extend Battery Life (2023)

The Steam Deck battery has turn into a crutch for it. While many individuals are fawning over this handheld gaming marvel by Valve, the console is infamous for its disappointing battery life. The 5,313 mAh battery that fuels the Steam Deck is inadequate to supply sufficient juice throughout intense gaming periods. The portability issue goes down the drain when you’ll want to keep it plugged right into a charger relatively typically. And with Valve exhibiting disinterest in releasing a second-gen mannequin with improved battery life and show anytime quickly, there are just a few methods using which you’ll enhance the battery lifetime of your Steam Deck. In this text, we discover one of the best ways to increase the sport time you will get out of Steam Deck.

1. Adjust the Screen Brightness

One of the most important culprits for the battery drain on the Steam Deck is display brightness. It occurs on cell phones, and the identical is the case with the Steam Deck. Turning the brightness down of the display of Steam Deck to 60-70% helps add some minutes to the battery life. Furthermore, setting the brightness to 50-60% inside a room is ample, as the synthetic lighting from energy bulbs hardly makes it tough to view issues on the Steam Deck.

To regulate the brightness in your Steam Deck, first, maintain the three-dot button beneath the fitting trackpad. Then, flick the left joystick as much as improve the display gentle and flick it all the way down to lower the brightness. Additionally, The system additionally accommodates an adaptive brightness setting in SteamOS. Here is how one can allow it:

• First, press the Steam button to carry up the menu and scroll all the way down to Settings. Press “A” to pick it.

• Here, go to “Display” settings. Then, allow the “Enable Adaptive Brightness” toggle. The brightness of the Steam Deck’s show will now regulate based mostly on the room’s brightness.

• Furthermore, customers can manually regulate the brightness using the slider on this display. And that’s one of many best strategies to increase the battery lifetime of your Steam Deck.

2. Turn Off Non-Essential Features

Steam Deck has important connectivity options for a handheld system, together with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and more. These options draw lots of energy when turned on. We don’t advocate turning off the Wi-Fi in any circumstances because the console and video games rely on the web to run and sync cloud saves.

However, turning the Bluetooth off when unused can avoid wasting battery energy in your Steam Deck. To flip off Bluetooth, observe the steps beneath:

• Press the Steam button to carry up the imply and go to the settings.

• Move to “Bluetooth” settings from the left sidebar.
• Select the Bluetooth toggle and switch it off. This ought to flip the Bluetooth off and save battery life.

3. Adjust Graphic Settings In-Game

Every trendy online game makes use of the CPU and GPU energy to ship crisp, stunning visuals. The larger the image high quality of a sport, the upper the CPU and GPU utilization. And each time the {hardware} utilization goes excessive, the system calls for more energy.

For a desktop, this isn’t a problem because it runs from an influence outlet. For a battery-based handheld like Steam Deck, the system will draw more energy from the battery each time higher constancy and graphics are demanded.

So, it’s endorsed to tweak the settings and backbone of a sport on Steam Deck. Doing so will scale back the load on the console, thus, leading to decrease energy consumption and longer battery life. Here are the settings we advocate you alter proper now:

• Reduce most graphics settings all the way down to medium
• Set Anisotropic settings to 2-4x
• Set particle and shadow results to low-medium
• You can keep texture settings as excessive.

Moreover, Steam Deck has a devoted group of players who share advisable settings for video games operating on the console. So we advocate you search them up and use them to get higher efficiency.

4. Adjust Steam Deck Frame Rate

Steam Deck has a characteristic that almost all trendy smartphones at the moment provide – adjusting the display refresh charge. Every time one thing occurs on the display, it refreshes to make sure that no matter occurs doesn’t look uneven, leading to a uniform, clean viewing. However, each time a display refreshes, it consumes battery energy. Higher the refresh charge, the upper the battery consumption.

The Steam Deck contains a 60Hz show that runs video games as much as 60FPS. While less-intensive video games make the most of the total potential of the display, it’s endorsed to decrease the refresh charge to 30Hz or 40Hz. Doing so would outcome within the Steam Deck not needing extra battery energy and saving some juice. Here is how one can regulate the body charge in your Steam Deck:

• Hit the fast entry button (three dots button) and head to the “Performance” part.

• Here, allow the “Use per-game profile” choice to vary the setting for that particular sport. Then, use the “Refresh Rate” slider and regulate it to 40Hz.

• Doing so will allow the Steam Deck to get different frame-rate choices other than 15, 30, and 60 FPS. Set the slider all the way down to 40FPS.

Following these steps will give your more battery life per playthrough. But in fact, every sport has a unique requirement. We examined this on Grand Theft Auto 4, locking the refresh charge to 40FPS, and received round 3.5 hours of battery life (together with adjusted graphic settings).

5. Adjust the TDP Requirements Per Game

Thermal Design Power, higher generally known as TDP, tells how a lot warmth is generated by the CPU and GPU. In flip, it signifies how a lot energy is consumed by the CPU and GPU. The Steam Deck could be set to a most TDP of 15W. And when a sport requires extra energy to ship playable framerates, larger TDP is a should. But that additionally ends in decrease battery life.

So, Valve giving customers the choice to regulate the TDP is a notable manner to enhance the battery lifetime of Steam Deck. Lowering the TDP will decrease the APU temperature, thus, eliminating bottlenecks and rising battery life. That stated, learn to use the “TDP Limit” characteristic in your Steam Deck proper right here:

• Follow this information to entry the Steam Deck efficiency overlay whilst you’re in-game. Ensure the “Use per-game profile” choice is enabled, as you’ll be able to set a unique TDP restrict for every sport.

• Scroll all the way down to the toggle on the “TDP Limit” choice.

• Now, use the “Watts” slider to decrease the TDP for that specific sport. An common of 10-12 watts TDP ought to be excellent for many video games launched round 2012-2013. Remember to regulate the TDP such that the sport stays playable and doesn’t stutter. Lowering the TDP an excessive amount of will end in body drops and uneven gameplay.

You may regulate the GPU clock velocity to increase the battery lifetime of your Steam Deck. However, except you might be somebody who is aware of what they’re doing, we advise in opposition to it as an absurdly low GPU clock frequency could make the sport unplayable.

6. Utilize AMD’s FSR In Performance Settings

One of the marvelous technological improvements that GPU makers like Nvidia and AMD have give you is AI upscaling for video video games. While Nvidia’s DLSS is locked behind its proprietary RTX playing cards, AMD makes its tech open-source for everybody. Luck has it the Steam Deck makes use of a proprietary AMD APU and the choice to make use of the upscaling choice referred to as AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (AMD FSR).

The AMD FSR choice upscales a low-resolution image to a better decision, leading to a better body charge and higher image high quality. For instance, rendering the feel at low decision and turning on FSR ends in the sport outputting higher image high quality with none loss in body charge. This expertise is helpful for 4K rendering and Steam Deck. Valve has even stated that enabling FSR in trendy titles can enhance the battery lifetime of Steam Deck. So observe these steps to activate FSR:

• Head to the Performance menu by urgent the Quick Access button (three-dot button).
• Here, you’ll discover the “Scaling Filter” choice.

• Use the slider right here and choose “FSR” to allow it.

• Underneath it, FSR Sharpness determines how sharp the textures and image high quality look. We counsel tweaking this setting and seeing what fits you best.

Theoretically, this could permit the system to upscale the rendered image to a greater high quality, leading to crisp image high quality. While noticing the finer particulars may turn into tough on the small display, FSR is a good perform when using the console in docked mode.

7. Stream the Game Using Steam Link

The ultimate resolution to increase the battery lifetime of your Steam Deck entails not enjoying the sport on the hand-held natively. Instead, you make the most of the Steam Link streaming choice, a expertise Valve developed over time, permitting sport streaming on the identical network. The course of is easy if the consumer is logged into the identical Steam account on their gaming PC and Steam Deck. To stream the sport on Steam Deck, observe the steps beneath:

• First, activate “Remote Play” on each Steam Deck and Steam.
• To entry the settings in your PC, head to “Settings -> Remote Play.” Here, verify the “Enable Remote Play” choice.

• On Steam Deck, head to “Settings -> Remote Play” as nicely. Enable the Remote Play toggle to connect with the principle PC.

• Once performed, open the sport you wish to stream within the library. In our case, we tried streaming Grand Theft Auto 5 on our Steam Deck.

• On the sport web page, click on on the arrow beside the “Install” button. Click on it to carry up the menu.

• From the menu, choose your desktop PC. Doing so will change the set up button to stream.

Wi-Fi connection is important to stream video games out of your desktop to your Steam Deck with out lag. However, following this feature contributes to raised battery life, as technically, the sport makes use of the {hardware} of the desktop and never Steam Deck.

Optimize Your Steam Deck Battery Life

This article covers the varied methods to enhance the battery lifetime of the Steam Deck. There are quite a few methods to tweak the settings to get the utmost efficiency out of this handheld marvel from Valve. It can also be price noting whereas Steam Deck is a implausible machine out-of-the-box, you must tweak the settings to witness its full potential. Do you’ve gotten a go-to technique to preserve battery life on the Steam Deck? Let us know within the feedback part beneath.

Frequently Asked Questions