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Will the steam deck throttle?
The short answer is no, Steam Deck does not throttle. The slightly longer answer is: no, but you can limit yourself if you really want to.
Given the size of the Steam deck, you’d be forgiven for thinking the APU’s cores would throttle when things got bad. After all, many users will see thermal or battery life throttling in high-performance laptops, where the CPU and GPU can be deliberately reserved to help cool the laptop itself.
But that’s not the case with Steam Deck, where the custom AMD APU in Valve’s new handheld can run at full speed forever without any issues. This was part of the original design specification for Aerith, the production name for the AMD Van Gogh-based silicon at the heart of the deck. Aerith is fundamentally designed to work within the constraints of a handheld machine, both in terms of power consumption and the machine’s thermal envelope.
AMD’s Sebastian Nussbaum Introduction to Chips Being “optimized for consistent performance over long periods of time”, this means the focus is always on sustained gaming performance without throttling. This is of course our experience in testing on the Steam platform.
That’s not to say you can’t limit the power of the CPU and GPU yourself, in fact that’s exactly what you want to do to extend your machine’s battery life. There are several ways to do this in the Advanced Properties menu, accessible in SteamUI or in-game by clicking the “…” button.
The easiest way to improve battery life is to limit the frame rate to 30fps using the toggle in the menu. Depending on the game, this can significantly reduce power consumption, which can extend battery life. For example, we’ve seen a 147% increase in battery life when playing God of War when switching from the standard 60fps limit to 30fps lock. If you want to explore further, it’s worth using performance overrides to see how settings affect various elements of the system, but it’s also essential.
If you want to learn more, you can choose to manually set the GPU clock or use the thermal power (TDP) limit. Manual GPU clock control lets you focus only on the GPU and choose to set the clock from as low as 200W all the way up to 1600W. You can also set the thermal power limit from 3W to 15W, although you’ll need to know what you’re doing here to get consistently smooth performance.
Both power and clock limits can have unpredictable behavior on your performance, so if you’re in any doubt, sticking to frame rate limits is probably your best bet. However, if you’re experimenting, you can choose that option, and other users may find that limiting one of these yields better performance and battery life than just setting the framerate limit to 30fps. For your favorite games, games where 30 fps isn’t enough is worth watching.
Of course, if you just want to play games and aren’t too concerned about battery life, you don’t have to touch any of these settings. In the most demanding games, you’ll still typically complete at least 90 minutes without caps, while less demanding games can be as long as 7 hours. It all depends on the game you’re playing, and how close you are to the charger. It also doesn’t make sense if you’re playing with the Steam Deck plugged in, you can let the Aerith APU do its thing without being constrained by power or frame rate limitations.