Valve’s latest Steam Deck update offers battery life improvement with these frame limiter settings
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Valve released the Steam Deck back in 2022, with the three year anniversary for the handheld arriving in around a week’s time. Since then, it has been the most popular PC handheld on the market and has weathered the storm of competition from the likes of the ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.
One of the reasons for the Deck’s ongoing success is excellent support on the software side of things. And now, a new update to the SteamOS Beta Client offers something people are always keen to get more of: battery life. This comes not long after Valve pushed a new update to the stable client to the fix the notorious green eye issue in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Latest Steam Deck Beta Client Update is now available for download
We love to see regular updates for the Steam Deck, though it’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of them are for the Beta or Preview channels ahead of Stable releases. If you want to update to this latest version, you’ll need to be running on the Beta version; this can be done by tapping the ‘Steam’ button, going to system settings, and navigating to the ‘Beta Participation’ options.
General
- Fixed an error on the Downloads page when a Free to Play game is removed during installation
Steam Input
Source: Steam
- Reduced polling rate while the Steam Frame Limiter is active to save additional power. This can save up to 6% on battery life when running at 30fps in a low-power game like HL2
- Fixed an error on the virtual menu settings when bound to gyro
It’s a small update, but the biggest upgrade here is the change to the Steam Frame Limiter. As shown above, you can find the Frame Limit settings by tapping the quick access button (the ‘three dots’ button under the right trackpad); ensure the Disable Frame Limit option is turned off to edit your frame limit settings.
According to Valve, newly-reduced polling rate for this setting helps save additional power. The example given is a 6% improvement in Half-Life 2 when running at a 30 FPS limit, though it’s hard to know how much difference this will make across a wider range of games. Either way, it’s a nice addition if you’re trying to squeeze out every last second of battery life.
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