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

The Steam Deck battery has turn out to be 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 offer sufficient juice throughout intense gaming classes. The portability issue goes down the drain when it’s good to keep it plugged right into a charger reasonably usually. And with Valve displaying disinterest in releasing a second-gen mannequin with improved battery life and show anytime quickly, there are a number of 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 may get out of Steam Deck.

1. Adjust the Screen Brightness

One of the largest 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 adequate, as the factitious lighting from energy bulbs hardly makes it troublesome to view issues on the Steam Deck.

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

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

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

• Furthermore, customers can manually alter 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 loads 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 under:

• Press the Steam button to convey 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 fashionable 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 at any time when the {hardware} utilization goes excessive, the system calls for more energy.

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

So, it is suggested 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 neighborhood of players who share really useful 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 function that almost all fashionable smartphones in the present day supply – adjusting the display refresh price. 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, easy viewing. However, each time a display refreshes, it consumes battery energy. Higher the refresh price, 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 is suggested to decrease the refresh price to 30Hz or 40Hz. Doing so would end result within the Steam Deck not needing further battery energy and saving some juice. Here is how one can alter the body price 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 alter it to 40Hz.

• Doing so will allow the Steam Deck to get different frame-rate choices aside from 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 price to 40FPS, and obtained round 3.5 hours of battery life (together with adjusted graphic settings).

5. Adjust the TDP Requirements Per Game

Thermal Design Power, higher referred to 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 may be set to a most TDP of 15W. And when a sport requires further 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 means 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” function 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 possibly can 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 exact sport. An common of 10-12 watts TDP must 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 can even alter the GPU clock pace to increase the battery lifetime of your Steam Deck. However, until 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 known 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 price 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 price. This expertise is helpful for 4K rendering and Steam Deck. Valve has even stated that enabling FSR in fashionable 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 will see that 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 enable the system to upscale the rendered image to a greater high quality, leading to crisp image high quality. While noticing the finer particulars would possibly turn out to be troublesome on the small display, FSR is a good perform when using the console in docked mode.

7. Stream the Game Using Steam Link

The remaining answer to increase the battery lifetime of your Steam Deck includes 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 under:

• 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 properly. Enable the Remote Play toggle to connect with the principle PC.

• Once executed, 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 convey up the menu.

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

A very good Wi-Fi connection is important to stream video games out of your desktop to your Steam Deck with out lag. However, following this selection 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 be value noting whereas Steam Deck is a improbable machine out-of-the-box, you need to tweak the settings to witness its full potential. Do you have got a go-to technique to preserve battery life on the Steam Deck? Let us know within the feedback part under.

Frequently Asked Questions