Mastering Your Steam Deck: 15 Settings You Need To Know

are you tired of a subpar gaming experience on your steam deck have you ever wondered if there's a way to optimize your device for the best possible gameplay well you're in luck because in this video I'm going to show you how to take your steam deck to the next level with some of the best settings and configurations whether you prefer to crank up the graphic settings for a fully immersive experience or dial everything back for a smoother frame rate the steam deck gives you the freedom to choose if you've seen my unboxing video on the sting deck you know that I was having some major fan noise when I first started using this device so let's take a look at some things you can do to avoid that grab your steam deck and let's get started if you're new to the channel my name is Randall and you're watching Tech Stewart let's get this out of the way first there are two ways to change settings on the steam deck the first is the dedicated button on the right side of the screen with these three dots and it's called the quick access button this is where a large portion of the performance settings we look at today will be the full list of all settings can be accessed by using the button on the left side of the screen labeled Steam button there will be a settings menu if you scroll down after pressing this now that that's out of the way let's get to our performance and battery life settings first first up is the refresh rate the steam deck has intuitively provided a setting for essentially maxing out the refresh rate in the quick access menu that will impact any game you play on a steam deck this is great because you can also do this in game 2 if you see the steam deck struggling to keep up with the speed of the game it's easy to do just click on the quick access button scroll down to where you see the battery icon where you see the refresh rate turn it down to your desired setting I think it's perfectly fine to turn this down to 30 frames per second but I have not seen that below that as any more beneficial by doing this you're going to save some extra battery life and things will be a little easier to handle for your steam deck I personally noticed that this setting and the next one really helped with the fan noise I was getting my steam deck had essentially the max settings for everything from day one it sounded like a freaking freight train and at the time I had no idea why now I never 2 this one is also located in the quick access menu called frame rate limiter the frame rate limiter allows us the ability to cap our frame rate at certain intervals this should help us smooth out the gameplay and make for a better experience change the fairing rate click on your quick settings button then go down to the battery icon then you'll see frame rate limit as an option and you can change it depending on what you have your refresh rate right below it set to if the refresh rate is at 60 frames per second then you will have three options to change the frame rate limit to 15 30 60 or you can leave it off for uncapped once you increase your refresh rate your frame rate limit options will go down by half of what your max refresh rate value is next up at number three we have how to adjust the TDP limit by default the steam deck allows up to 15 watts for the CPU and GPU while running games the maximum 15 watt is not always necessary to play all games if you're running less demanding games you can improve your battery life tremendously by adjusting the setting it can be trickier to choose the right wattage though so first let's go find out where it is to scroll down to the battery icon and find the TDP limit and you can use the slider by moving your left joystick left or right to decrease or increase it now while in game get to a screen where there is a lot of things going on where it looks really busy and it's really demanding on the device make sure the performance overlay is on and lower the TDP until your frame rate drops then increase it once and that's it I will say I don't think this is the best way because it is tricky but it will help on games that are less demanding on the device next up at number four we have another one that can be very beneficial for increasing the visual performance of your games it's called FSR FSR essentially upscales the image from a lower resolution to a higher resolution in order to do this we are going back to the quick access menu scroll down onto the battery icon scroll down now until you see scaling filter and you can also adjust the FSR sharpness right below that the one thing to note here is that there are some games that already have in-game FSR for those games you'll want to disable FSR otherwise it'll cause some weird visual fluctuations that won't be very pleasing the key here is to make sure the in-game resolution is lower than the steam decks resolution and you will see the resolution upscale while providing a smoother performance for the system if you want to check out what games have FSR by default go over to amd's website and you can find it there I'll try to link it in the description below moving on to number five we are going to take a look at the half rate shading option this applies a variable rate shading which essentially cuts down the resolution of pixel shaders to save you some battery life for graphically intense games you won't want to use this but for 2D games or Platformers with less demanding Graphics it might be worth it to enable this feature go to your quick access settings menu scroll down to the battery icon under the refresh rate option you'll see a toggle button to enable or disable half rate shading that's it pretty easy simple nothing crazy going on here at number six let's talk about the screen brightness and the enable adaptive brightness feature the steam deck has a setting to automatically adjust the brightness on your display depending on the ambient lighting conditions you're playing in the feature here is called enable adaptive brightness this is a toggle on off option that can be found through the main settings menu by disabling this you will no longer have a necessary brightness level changes during gameplay it can be distracting as well as just another feature to drain your battery life to disable this click on the steam button scroll down to the settings menu click on display and then click on enable adaptive brightness there'll be a toggle switch for on and off and that's all you need to do here also in general adjusting the brightness level through the quick access menu can also say Beyond battery life so unless you need it for a specific game you should lower the brightness as much as possible so that you don't Impact gameplay at number seven let's talk about the most unlikely battery life saver and that's airplane mode yes that's right your typical quick option that turns off all your wireless and Bluetooth connectivity for your steam deck can also help you save some battery life nothing special here but in order to enable this you'll go to the quick access menu and toggle the airplane mode to on you also have the option to disable Wi-Fi but allow Bluetooth in case you're using Bluetooth headphones by enabling the offline mode instead of airplane mode it's one less setting the steam deck is using while you're playing your games which will increase your battery life and performance last in our list of performance and Battery related settings it's possibly the best option on the list anyways the per game profiles option and the quick access menu the benefit to this feature is being able to set a specific performance setting profile for each game that you want to no longer do you need to rely on default for all of your games so if you have a platformer that has less intensive Graphics you can tone down a lot of your settings to maximize your battery life as well as the opposite for mid to high level graphic games where you need to turn it up or optimize your settings to improve performance for that specific game it's really simple to do and it only requires that you are in-game to be used while playing any game if you want a Custom Performance profile you just have to go to the quick access menu scroll down to the battery icon find the use per game profile and toggle it to enable now while you're playing the game in the future you can set Custom Performance settings that will automatically switch to it based on the game you're playing otherwise if it's disabled it will go back to the default you have for the steam deck itself now let's take a look into some of the unique gameplay settings options we have on the steam deck so the first one I'm going to cover is pretty awesome this is actually how you can stream games from your PC to your steam deck the benefit of doing this is it takes any hardware limitations out of the equation and you get the benefit of using the graphics card on your PC assuming you have a better PC for gaming than your steam deck of course in order to enable Remote Play It's really simple first thing is to make sure your PC is on and you are logged into steam next make sure that in the settings menu you have Remote Play enabled to do this click on the dedicated steam button scroll down to settings scroll down until you see Remote Play and the top option will be to enable Remote Play to a PC that is connected to the same Wi-Fi Now go to your games library and even if you don't have it installed you can choose to play a game from your steam Library remotely next one we're going to talk about is how to change some of the keyboard settings if you go to to your settings menu by pressing the steam button and scroll down to get to the keyboard settings here you can do things like change your keyboard theme change the level of haptics you want keyboard layout and where you want the keyboard located when it opens if you have custom keyboards you purchased or use points on from the store you can also use those here as well let's now look at a very unique option to the steam deck and that is night mode night mode will help you lower the blue light levels so that if you're gaming in dim or dark rooms it will help protect your eyes this feature can be enabled from either settings menu or the quick access menu but the settings menu has more configurable options so you might want to look there first let's focus on the settings menu in this scenario press the steam button scroll down to the settings go down to display and here you will find features on scheduling night mode automatically between certain times of day enabling night mode from now until tomorrow morning even changing the color temperature using a slider from cool to warm you even have an advanced option here where you can change the primary Hue the peak saturation and Shadow saturation to really dial it in specific to your needs honestly advanced mode is a little overboard but hey steam deck is all about the options this next one is not only helpful for on the steam deck but also for your steamed library in general if you've been collecting a lot of games over the years you should really look into creating game collections to organize your steamed library in order to do this go to your library scroll to whichever game you're looking at creating a collection for click on the options menu the one with the three horizontal lines at the top right then click on add to if you have a collection already you can simply add whatever game you've highlighted otherwise you can create a new collection here you will also be able to create a standard collection which is the default option and drag whichever titles you want to it or you can create a dynamic collection that will automatically move any new games to this collection if it matches the same type and critique area for example Shooters if you were to buy a new shooter game like Call of Duty it would recognize that and add it to the collection or maybe a race car driving game like Forza or something like that would automatically add that to a racing collection the fifth gameplay setting we're going to look at is how to protect your steam deck if you want to make your steam deck secure you need to know how to add a PIN to it this will prevent others from logging into your steam deck unless they know your PIN of course but let's just go ahead and check it out if this is something that interests you so first go to the settings menu Again by pressing on the steam button here you will see the security menu now you will have the three options when setting a lock screen and thus a pin one is system wake and power up or before showing the login screen or when switching to desktop mode if you select one of them it will ask you to set a pin you can have all three set at once as well it's just another way to protect your steam deck from your siblings your significant other or anybody else the next one is a simple one to track how your steam deck is performing in my opinion I think that is best to have at least the minimum version of this going while you're playing your games this will help you optimize your performance on the fly to make your experience just that much better in order to enable the performance overlay settings let's go to our quick access menu by clicking on the button with three dots from here scroll down to the battery and the first option right under your current battery life you will see performance overlay level you have the options of off one two three or four with number one being the minimum and it is getting larger and showing more as you go up to number four my favorite is number two which stretches across the top of the screen it shows just enough to be out of the way but helpful enough to make some tweaks while you're gaming in case you're having any issues or you just want to optimize your performance more and the last one of the settings that we're going to go through is desktop mode don't forget at the heart of this device it's a mini computer on its own this is a Linux device so if you're a Windows user the layout will be a little bit different but not to worry you have all your Basics here to browse the internet add new software add new gaming clients like Battlenet or epic Etc I'm not going to go much into this today but I'm planning on a video on docking the steam deck and using it as a PC to see its full capability to access desktop mode it's simple turn on the device and press and hold the power button until the menu pulls up then you can select the desktop option and then that'll pull up the home screen and you are good to go go ahead and add whatever you want to do whatever you want to this is a PC my time with the steam deck has really been amazing so far I've been extremely happy with my purchase and I love the customization available and the vast amount of settings available at our disposal these are all obviously not all of the settings but I hope that I've given you some knowledge you didn't have before or for those of you looking to purchase there is so much you have to look forward to now guys if you enjoyed the video consider liking it and if you want to see more content from me in the future hit that subscribe button it's free to you and you can unsubscribe at any time thanks for joining me today and I'll see you in my next one bye guys

Channel: Tech Stewart

Views: 22,688

Keywords: Steam Deck, Steam Deck unboxing, Steam Deck Performance, Steam Deck Settings, Steam Deck Optimization, Steam Deck Gamplay Settings, Steam Deck Review, Valve Steam Deck

Id: 6qj7FEemln4

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2023