Valve’s powerful new handheld is a beast, but it does not last long. Here’s how to extend your Steam Deck’s battery life.
Valve’s Steam Deck is an incredible machine with the ability to play thousands of PC games in handheld form, not to mention a wide-open system that has enabled users to do all kinds of crazy things with it. But if there’s one area where the Steam Deck could use a little help, it’s the battery life.
Playing system-intensive games on your Steam Deck can drain the battery in no time at all, and the thing uses so much juice that many of your existing chargers probably can’t supply it with power quickly enough to keep the frags going. Thankfully, there’s no reason to lose hope. There are plenty of steps you can take to eke out more life from your Steam Deck.
Let’s get the complex stuff out of the way first and dig into your Deck’s performance settings. With any game open, press the Quick Access menu button (the one with the three dots under the right trackpad) and navigate to Performance Settings (the battery icon). By default, the only thing that will appear in this menu is the performance overlay slider, which allows you to control how much performance-related information you can see on screen. Play around with it if you want, but more importantly, head into the Advanced View menu.
This is where you’ll find the bulk of your performance settings. Note that, if you scroll down to the very bottom, you’ll see your battery’s current capacity, plus an estimate of how much time is remaining until it drains to empty with your current usage and settings.
The first thing you have to understand is that your results are going to vary widely by game. The majority of titles that you play on your Steam Deck were not designed or optimized with a handheld system in mind. In some cases, you might take all the steps you can and still find they make little to no difference, or that the game performs so poorly with lower settings that it’s not worth the trade-off.
With that in mind, take a look at the Use per-game profile setting. With this off, your game will use your universal, default settings. With the setting toggled on, any tweaks you make will be saved to the currently open game’s individual performance profile. Since every game will perform differently, this is an incredibly useful tool.
The next settings as you scroll down are Framerate Limit and Refresh Rate. The first controls your game’s frames per second (fps), while the latter is how often your screen refreshes to show a new image. These settings are linked: For example, if you cap your Deck’s refresh rate at 40, your frame rate limits will change from 15/30/60 to 10/20/40.
Limiting how many frames your game displays and how often your screen refreshes can affect battery life, but these settings can also have a significant impact on a game’s performance. Some games only run at 30 fps anyway, while others default to 60. Even then, you can often turn the frame rate down in small increments (say, from 60 to 40) without noticing much of a difference. In return, you’ll gain significantly more playtime.
You’ll find more options below the refresh rate slider.
