Steam Deck May Limit FPS to Save Power
Valve announced an optional fps-lock feature for the Steam Deck console. This limiter is supposed to enable the device to run longer on a single battery charge.
- One of the developers is reporting an optional feature of Steam Deck, which will limit fps to increase operation time.
An interview with one of Valve's developers, Pierre-Loup Griffais, sheds some light on the technical side of Valve's new console, the Steam Deck. According to Griffais the device is powerful enough to run any game from Steam (even AAA titles) and enable us to play it a respectable 30 fps. A large part of this is due to well-chosen components - APU based on AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2. Certainly 800p resolution will also help in this. And when it comes to operation time, Deck may have quite an interesting feature that the engineer writes about:
While 30 fps is considered a minimum these days, most games should achieve much higher values, so you'll be able to enable a feature that will limit the number of fps in order to extend your gaming time. Reducing the number of fps should reduce the GPUs's power requirements and thus save battery life. It is not clear whether this (optional) feature will only introduce a hard limit of 30 fps, or whether it will work as a dynamically controlled trade-off between gaming comfort and battery life (thus, periodic drops below 30 frames would be possible).
A (relatively) small device with gaming capabilities rivalling a desktop computer arouses a lot of interest, but the opportunity to try out its touchpads and analog triggers is stil far off. Steam Deck can already be reserved, though shipping isn't expected to begin until December of this year.
