How to Improve Steam Deck Battery Life

Valve's Steam Deck has taken the PC gaming world by storm, essentially giving gamers access to their PC library without having to haul their heavy gaming laptops around. One of the biggest sticking points of this new piece of gaming hardware, though, is the lackluster battery life.

Like most handheld gaming devices, the Steam Deck's battery just isn't going to give you all-day gaming without needing to be charged at some point. But there are some things you can do to help improve the battery life on your Steam Deck, giving you some extra room to work.

Preorders for the Steam Deck went live early this year. However, now it's much easier to get your hands on Valve's handheld gaming device. And, if you've already picked one up—or plan on adding one to your gaming arsenal soon—you can do a few quick things to try to eke more battery life out of it.

One of the first things you should do to improve battery life when you get your Steam Deck is to change the performance settings. You can access the device's Performance Settings from the Quick Access menu button under the right trackpad. By default, you're able to see a ton of performance-related information, but it's all tied to a single slider. If you select Advanced View, though, you'll find a ton of options that you can customize.

The first thing to do is scroll all the way to the bottom where the settings show your current battery usage and estimated charge remaining. You can use this to decide how much you should tweak the performance settings. From there, work through the settings until you find something that gives you more battery life without sacrificing graphics quality too much.

Next up, try turning down your frame rate and refresh rate. The Steam Deck comes equipped with a Framerate Limit and a Refresh Rate. While it can be tempting to stick these to the highest settings available, you can always turn it down a little bit in games that don't require a smooth 60hz refresh rate all the time to help save some battery life.

This isn't an ideal change for those who want to experience extreme graphical fidelity on their Steam Deck, but it is a nice way to change how intense games are, like 2018's God of War, which recently ported over to the PC.

Another helpful thing you can do is set up per-game profiles. Most games available on the Steam Deck just weren't designed for the lower-powered system that runs Valve's handheld. While that isn't a huge issue—as the AMD chip in the device is doing a lot of work to make up for that lower performance—it does mean you'll see some varied results in how each game performs and utilizes the performance capabilities of the system overall.

If you utilize the per-game profile setting, then you can tweak your system to run based on exactly which game is being played. This will allow you to cut graphical options a bit more in certain games, which will always eke out more battery life in the long run.

Now that you've improved your Steam Deck's battery life, make sure you check in on the next Steam Sale to add new games to your gaming library.