The Steam Deck’s best feature — bar none, if you ask me — is the portable gaming PC that lets you get the most out of its AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 40 watt-hour battery. As of the previous update, you can reduce the screen refresh rate by increase Your effective framerate and low latency, and you’ve been able to throttle CPU, GPU, and frame limiters since launch. The catch: even if you’ve found a great combination that has you craving battery life and/or performance, the Steam Deck won’t save Those settings per game.
Every time you switch to a different game, you’ll have to remember them, and flick the toggle appropriately. which is changing today.
Wednesday’s update now comes with per-game performance settings, so you can flick a single switch in the quick access menu to set up a custom performance profile for each of your games.
Now you don’t need to set 40/40 manually every time you launch Elden Ring, if that’s your cup of tea.
Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge
Flick it on, and you’ll be back to your global system settings, so you can have both a “generally I like my games running at 30fps” setting, but not “elden ring Must run at 40fps with 40Hz refresh rate” and “vampire survivors Should run at 10 fps and 5 watts because I want to play it for the whole ride of this car” if you like.
This has been one of the most requested Steam Deck features since the beginning, and I expect more to come – because it Not there Lets you set up multiple profiles (like one profile for when you plug in AC power, and another for the longest battery life you can manage), or save and share profiles with the larger community So that we power users can help less-tweak – those of us are glad their games are running better.
Your global performance profile isn’t depleting either.
Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge
(Valve has already shown us how powerful Community Controllers can be with profiles – a big reason why many ancient games on Steam Deck are instantly playable is because users had to upload configurations for Steam Controllers back in the day. was encouraged.)
I suspect Valve is very aware of this, and today’s update lays the groundwork for that as well. Because the Steam deck still may not be ready for all that Nintendo Switch can pick up, update after update shows that Valve is listening closely and carefully to user feedback.
digital foundry The adjustable refresh rate and fan curve of recent past updates lets you get the most out of Steam Deck. I am embedding a copy below for your viewing pleasure.
You can read the full Steam Deck changelog here. The rest are mostly bugfixes, though you can now also hold down the power button to “stop streaming” the game, and Valve moved the haptics and rumble toggles away from the quick access menu. This is a change I really disagree with; They came in handy when an old game (can’t remember which) was really overzealous with vibrato.
