The Steam Deck is proving a new favorite of plenty of gamers, providing a surprisingly viable option for PC gaming on the go. To get the most of Valve’s portable console, though, you’re going to want to maximize the battery life on the thing. Here’s how.
Choose your games wisely
The Steam Deck can last anywhere from two to eight hours on a single charge by most accounts. Some of that is down to what you’re playing — playing a lo-fi indie title like Celeste will understandably be less demanding on the console than, say, Elden Ring. So if you’ve got a long flight coming up, consider giving some love to the vast collection of smaller titles out there. Of course, if you’re only planning on playing for a couple of hours anyway, then feel free to go to town on one of the big names like God of War.
Change up your graphics options
The Steam Deck does extraordinarily well for such a relatively little thing, but there are some ways in which it aims to overachieve. The high-definition 1200×800 display is great and is capable of running games at a delightful 60fps, but chugging along at that level can be a bit of a drain on the battery.
The console’s OS comes with a built-in framerate limiter available in its options menu, through which you can set a system-level framerate of 30fps. That’s plenty for the Deck’s small but effective display, and many more graphically-intense titles will only be able to hit 30fps anyway.
In a similar vein, it’s often worth having a poke around in the graphics options for whatever game you’re playing as well. As nice as the Steam Deck’s display is, it’s still much smaller than the average gaming monitor, so any visual downgrades are understandably going to be less noticeable while playing. The more of those settings you can knock down a few notches, the longer the battery will last. If all else fails, even something as simple as lowering the screen’s brightness can help a lot.
Tinker with more advanced settings
It’s possible to wring even more battery life out of the Steam Deck if you’re willing to take a look under the hood.
Note: It should be noted that messing around with some of the more advanced settings available can have adverse effects if you don’t know what you’re doing, though, so be careful.
Squirreled away in the Steam Deck’s settings, you can find some more things to tinker with that will help the console consume less power. Setting the GPU’s clock speed to a static value, for example, will keep it running at a particular level rather than changing depending on the game and other circumstances. On more demanding games, this will often save some battery life at the cost of some visual fidelity, but it may have the opposite effect on lighter games, so beware.
Similarly, there’s a setting to limit the system’s TDP or Thermal Design Power. This is essentially a measurement for how much power is being consumed by the processor, so naturally, it’s a great way to claw back some extra battery time. Set it too low, though, and performance will start to suffer drastically, so try and find the right balance.
There’s also AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, which can give both better performance and better battery life, in some cases improving battery life by over an hour, according to YouTuber The Phawx.
