Logically, although in this article we are going to base ourselves on Valve’s handheld console, in reality it is also valid in most cases for any other handheld console, be it a Nintendo Switch, the new Asus ROG Ally or any other. Let’s see what steps you can take to try to make your battery last longer so you can have longer gaming sessions.
Settings to Extend Steam Deck Battery Life
First of all, you should keep one thing in mind: settings that can extend the battery life of the Steam Deck could impoverish your gaming experience, because to make the battery last longer, we will have to sacrifice d other things, such as performance. However, this shouldn’t really have a negative impact either, as it will very much depend on the game you’re playing and its demand on the console’s hardware.
That said, we go with the tips.
Reduce screen brightness
One of the most obvious things you can do to extend your battery life is to lower the screen brightness, as this goes a long way to letting the battery dry in a short time. Keep in mind, however, that lowering the brightness will make the screen less visible to you if there’s a lot of ambient light, especially if you’re outside… but if you’re on the couch at home, for example. , you won’t see the screen notice much of a difference either.
To do this, you must click on the Steam button on the console and then go to Settings -> Display and disable the adaptive brightness option. Disabling this option will not only disable the light sensor (which also consumes some battery life), but will also unlock the ability to use the console’s brightness adjustment slider.
Lower the thermal power limit
The Steam Deck has settings you won’t see on any other console… not even on PC, and one of them is the thermal power limit. Changing this setting will allow you to reduce the amount of power consumed by the CPU, which will significantly increase battery life at the cost of reduced performance (but as we mentioned before, this will also depend on the games you want to play and the requirement). they are). .
To do this, we must press the shortcut button (if the Steam button is located on the left, under the trackpad, it is on the right, on the right between the trackpad and the speaker) then go down to the icon of battery. Then select Performance, Performance Settings and there you will see there is a “switch” called Thermal Power Limit. By activating it, you reduce the consumption of the processor from 15 to 3 watts, drastically reducing the consumption of the battery but also the performance of the console. Be careful with this.
Limiting FPS improves battery life on the Steam Deck
A better alternative to the above to avoid losing so much performance is to limit the FPS, because this way you will have adequate performance in games but you will avoid consuming energy to generate additional FPS which you do not really don’t need. To do this, go back to quick access, click on the battery icon again, Performance and performance settings (exactly the same as before), but what you need to activate is “Framerate Limit” .
Here you can limit the maximum FPS so that the energy is not consumed absurdly; Attention, it depends on the firmware version you have, you can choose between 10, 20 or 40 FPS limit, or 15, 30 and 60.
Adjust graphics in games
You already know that in essence the Steam Deck is a PC in the form of a portable console, so in reality you run the games as is and you can change the graphics settings in the menu of the game itself.
It is well known that the higher the graphics settings in games, the more the APU of the Steam Deck will be stressed, which means that it will consume more energy; therefore, if you do the opposite (slacken the settings) it will consume less power and therefore the battery will last longer.
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