Performance Tuning Guide - oh-nyoo/steam-deck-advance GitHub Wiki

The Steam Deck offers a ton of features that allow you to tweak the performance of games. There are three main categories to consider:

  1. Image quality
  2. Performance
  3. Power consumption, heat, and fan noise

When you improve one of these categories, the others will suffer. The purpose of this guide is to help balance these.

Image quality

These will mostly be dependent on the in-game settings and resolution. Half Rate shading in the performance menu also affects this. The settings you will want to use will depend on the game you are running. You are probably familiar with these settings already.

Reasons to optimize for image quality:

  • You want a good looking game

Performance

Performance refers to Frames per second, frametime, and latency. These are mostly dependent on the Performance settings available by pressing the '...' button. This includes the Framerate Limit, Thermal Power (TDP) limit, and Manual GPU Clock Control. These will scale inversely with the image quality.

Reasons to optimize for performance:

  • More responsive gameplay
  • Reduce motion sickness

Power consumption, heat, and fan noise

These will scale inversely with both the image quality and performance options. It is mostly dependent on the Thermal Power (TDP) limit.

Reasons to optimize for power:

  • Longer play sessions without charging
  • Lower fan speed

Tuning Guide

How you tune your Steam Deck will depend on your personal preferences and what is available to you. What is amazing about the Steam Deck is how you can tailor your gameplay experience to meet your needs.

Observe CPU/GPU Usage

  1. Load the game you wish to play and go to a location that is graphically intensive
  2. In the game settings, use graphics settings and set a resolution that is acceptable to you
  3. In the performance menu, set the overlay level to 4
  4. In the performance menu, set a framerate that is acceptable to you
  5. In the performance menu, disable TDP limit and enable Manual GPU Clock Control
  6. Play the game and observe your maximum GPU usage % and the highest CPU MHz used.

Adjust Performance Settings

  1. If you are experiencing spikes on the frametime graph, lower image quality settings
  2. Reduce GPU Clock as much as possible until your min frametime is <30
  3. Try increasing image quality as much as you can with your current GPU clock
  4. Enable the TDP limit and set it to the highest value
  5. Reduce TDP limit as much as possible until your min frametime is <30
    1. You can also compare your highest CPU Mhz to what you recorded earlier to determine if you are CPU limited
  6. If your TDP limit is too high to your liking (battery consumption or fan noise) reduce image quality and restart

At this point, you just need to test and make small adjustments to make the configuration to your liking. In my experience, reducing my TDP limit until my battery usage was below 14W (need to be unplugged to see this) significantly reduced my fan noise. This will depend on your Deck, fan model, airflow, ears, volume setting, and whether you are using headphones.

Additional tips

  1. While brightness is not really a performance setting, it may reduce the amount of heat produced, allowing you to increase TDP while keeping your fan speed low
  2. Manually clocking the GPU results in a more stable framerate for me than only setting the TDP, but you can try toggling the manual GPU clock after determining what TDP to use