Steam Deck gets optional frame rate limiter to improve battery life

Valve’s upcoming Steam Deck handheld will have an optional feature to throttle framerate. This should improve the battery life of the device. The company also emphasizes once again that the aforementioned target of 30 fps is a minimum.

The optional frame rate limiter allows users to ‘tune performance versus battery life’, writes Valve employee Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter. He does not mention specific examples. The company has previously reported that Portal 2 at 30fps would be good for a battery life of six hours, while users can play the same game for up to four hours with an unlocked frame rate, writes Engadget, among others.

Valve also reported in an interview with IGN last week that the company is aiming for a framerate of at least 30fps for Steam Deck games at native resolution. Griffais emphasizes again on Twitter that this is a minimum. “The ’30fps target’ refers to the lower bound of what we consider playable in our performance tests; games we’ve tested and showcased have consistently met and exceeded that standard to date,” said the Valve developer.

The Steam Deck should be released in December. This handheld PC features a semi-custom AMD soc with four Zen 2 processor cores and an RDNA 2 GPU with eight compute units. This makes the chip based on the same architecture as the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X and S. The Steam Deck has a processing power of 1.6Tflops, which on paper is more comparable to the last-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft. The handheld comes standard with SteamOS, but is also compatible with other operating systems, such as Windows.

The tweet from Valve employee Pierre-Loup Griffais. Image via Twitter