Steam Deck: Getting Started - Configuration and Tinkering "How-to" | Step-by-step Guide | Deck Tech

out of the box the team deck does a great job at letting you download and play compatible games whenever and wherever you want however to get the most out of it the steam deck requires a bit of tinkering and well this can be a bit intimidating this is also what makes the deck so exciting because once you get your bearings you can make the deck do all kinds of amazing things that you couldn't even dream of doing on any other handheld or console in this video I'll be going through everything you need to know to do that tinkering from setting frame rate limits to using custom proton versions and programs that you need to have on your deck there's a lot to cover first of all though if this video is helpful to you go ahead and subscribe and send the video to someone you know with a deck to help them out too I'll be covering a lot of different topics in this video so if you want to skip to a specific topic use the time stamps down below just get right to what you need to learn first up I want to talk about how you do some of the more common and general configuration within the gaming mode on the steam deck if you're using a Micro SD card with your steam deck you might have noticed something a little unusual when you go to install a game and get past this screen it just goes ahead and starts downloading without prompting you for where you want to actually install the game so you might be wondering well how do I actually get these games on my SD card if it's not going to prompt me well what you have to actually do is set a default install path for your steam deck to tell it where you want to install your games the way to do this is you go to settings and then you go to storage all the way down here and you'll notice that when you hover over one of the places you install a game the x button will set it to make it the default so you can actually drive to make the internal drive your default or you can X on the micro SD card whichever one you have set is the default that is where the steam deck will be downloading your games the next setting you should know how to change is the fan curve when the steam deck first came out a lot of our viewers complained that the fan could get quite noisy and valve listened and implemented a new fan curve that was quieter however this new fan curve also means the fan is not spinning as fast so while it is quieter your steam deck could actually get a bit hotter if you don't like this new default fan curve perhaps because you've noticed your deck getting a little bit hot when playing some intense games for long periods of time valve has given you the setting in order to switch back to that original fan curve the way you do it is you go into the settings and you go to system and you scroll all the way to the bottom past all this information and down here there's a setting enable updated fan control simply toggle this off and your fan will ramp up to much higher speeds this will make the fan louder however it'll also make your steam deck significantly cooler when playing demanding titles next up you'll need to know how you change your settings for control and steam input this is pretty simple on any game page you'll notice over here on the right there is a button with a little controller icon just hit it and it'll bring up this UI which lets you either pick an existing layout to use or customize a layout if you go up here you can pick from both the recommended layout generic templates for a number of items or ones that the community have made specifically for this game and then shared online for other people to download you might find that there's some really good Community layouts out there for playing games in the steam deck especially for games that don't have built-in controller support a lot of people have taken the time to create custom profiles for controllers or for the steam deck for games that don't actually have Gamepad support and by going here and downloading a community layout you can find something that makes even non-controller games run really well on the steam deck the next topic is perhaps the most important one in this entire video and that is how you change the proton version for a game now without getting too technical proton is the compatibility layer that the deck uses in order to have Windows games be able to run on Linux now because these games were designed to run under windows and not under Linux or specifically on the steam deck there can be technical issues translating Windows over to Linux and as a result you might find yourself needing to change which version of proton you were running because one might have better compatibility with a game than another or even use a custom proton version supplied by someone other than valve the way you do this is you go over here and click this little gear icon to bring up the settings then go to properties and under compatibility you get the option Force the use of a specific steam play compatibility tool Now by default this will be set to whatever the most recent version of proton is however you can go through this list and pick any specific version you want whereas in proton experimental which is the most recent beta version or like I've done use GE proton which I'll tell you how to install later on in this video which is a custom third-party proton solution which has additional support for a number of games for example if you look here Fall Guys is actually unsupported by the steam deck according to valve it will not run and they are correct in saying so if you download Fall Guys on your steam deck and try to just run it normally it will not work however if you use GE proton the game boots up and runs just fine so having GE protons set up on your deck and knowing how to change between different versions of proton is crucial to making sure you get the best possible experience playing games on your deck next let's talk about the most important button on the steam deck and one you're going to be using quite a bit which is this one right here with the three dots on it this is called the quick access button when you push it it brings up this menu with quick settings with lots of little things for you to change for instance you can change the brightness of the screen the Audio Level really quickly you can just turn things up and down or to change volume uh you have your microphone level settings as well as you know things like Wi-Fi Bluetooth Etc you can see I have some Bluetooth devices here and some other miscellaneous settings all these quick settings are helpful this is not we're going to be using this for most of the time rather you're going to come down here to the performance tab this has a lot of really powerful tools for you now when you first pull it up it's going to look like this it's going to set to the basic View what you can do is you hit Advanced view to get all these detailed information first of all you have the performance overlay this lets you get a live readout of what what frame rate you're getting of the current gamer play this first setting just gets you a simple number in the top left corner of what your current frame rate is extend a little higher you can get a lot more detailed information about your frame rate he'd even go crazy and set it up to three or way way overboard and get everything a tinkerer could ever possibly want to know now this is a bit much to me so for now I'm just gonna set it down to two while I continue to talk about some of the other cool settings you have available to you here right here you'll see this setting use per game profile now if you're going to customize anything in this menu you probably want to turn this on what this does is it lets you set custom settings per game so for instance you can set a custom frame rate cap specifically for Final Fantasy 14 and then a different frame rate cap for a different game this allows you to tailor your experience for each game for the sort of performance visual quality level and battery life that you want to get out of that particular game so the big option you have to set is your refresh rate and your frame rate so by default it'll be set to 60 which will run the game at an uncapped frame rate you can see that playing Final Fantasy 14 in this rather busy area I can't quite hit 60. I'm only hitting about 50 FPS now this is less than ideal as when you're getting 50 FPS on a 60hz refresh display it doesn't look so hot so something you could do is simply lower this frame rate to 30. you can see it immediately updates with the new cap of 30 FPS and I can just close hit the button to close the quick access menu and go back to running around the game and now I have a silky smooth 30 FPS well silky smooth is a bit of an overstatement isn't it as we all know 30fps is kind of less than ideal it ends up looking a bit choppy at least to my eyes but if you look in the top left you can see that our battery life has greatly improved by locking the FPS at 30. so if you're going to be away from a charger for a while and want to play a game quite a bit longer you can just open up this menu slap a 30 FPS cap on there and be in business personally I think 30fps is a bit low but as you can see we really weren't quite hitting 60. so what can we do well if you set something between 30 and 60 it just looks bad because it doesn't evenly divide into the 60hz refresh rate but if we open up that quick access menu again you can see that just the frame it limit is the setting for a refresh rate this lets you actually lower the refresh rate of the screen in the steam deck that way you can set the game to run at that frame rate some frame rate below 60 and still have it look really good because it'll still be matching one to one with the refresher of the display so what I like to recommend is cranking this refresh rate all the way down to 40. now as you can see by setting the refresh rate to 40 it actually changed my settings for frame rate limit to be the ones that are evenly divisible into 40. so I can just go up here to ferment limit set it to 40 and voila now I have a 40 FPS cap which is significantly smoother than 30. in fact it might be a bit counter-intuitive but 40 FPS is actually halfway between 30 and 60 as far as frame time goes so 40 FPS I actually find is a great compromise between 30 and 60 both for visual quality and also getting an extra little bit of battery life out of your game if the game you're playing can't quite hit 60fps or if the battery life is a bit lower than what you would want you should try setting the refresh rate to 40 and the frame rate cap to 40 and see how much better the battery life or performance is then now past those settings there's a couple extra settings in here half rate shading will run the game at effectively on Lower resolution I do not recommend this setting because as you can see it kind of makes the game look terrible and the performance and battery life savings are very minimal so this is not something that I would ever use these next two settings though but you manually set the total device power or the speed that the clock runs at now these are much more advanced settings and for and advancing my Final Fantasy 14 there's really not a lot to dial in here however if you're running a really old game or something on an emulator that doesn't need a lot of power you can come in here and crank these settings way way down and for doing that you can get some serious battery life out of older games we're talking five six plus hours for the most part I recommend just leave these settings off if you don't know what you're doing with those just don't touch them down here we have the scaling filter this is for when you're running games at a lower resolution than the deck screen you're telling it how you want to scale it up now this game's running at actual native resolutions if this won't do anything you have a couple options here some linear will just scale it up linearly it'll look kind of blurry uh integer will keep it at the exact resolution so if it's running at a lower resolution we'll just have black bars around it that's the nearest neighbor scaling in FSR which are simply a different way of scaling things up if you are playing a really like brand new game like Elgin ring or Doom or something that's really going to push the steam deck to the Limit this gives you the option of running it at a resolution below the decks needed resolution and then scaling it up to try and hit something like a smooth 60fps or get better battery life out of it this will degrade the image quality quite a bit however if that's not a big deal for you especially when you're looking at it on the small seven inch screen of the deck this is a great way to eke out some more performance this covers a lot of the configuration you can do from inside gaming mode to do more advanced things you'll have to switch over to desktop mode which you can do by hitting the steam button going down to power and selecting switch to desktop after a short way it'll boot up into desktop mode now once in desktop mode you'll find this looks like well like the desktop of a PC you're probably unfamiliar with Linux as I was when first getting the steam deck however it works very similarly to both Mac OS and windows so if you're familiar with using any sort of desktop PC you'll feel right at home here first out let's talk about about controls while in desktop mode if I default the way it works is the right trackpad will move the mouse around pushing in the right track pad will left click and pushing in the left track pad will right click now it should be noted that there is a weird Quirk with the controls and desktop mode on the steam deck where this is only how the controls work while steam is running if you close out of the steam application for whatever reason what will happen is for a moment the controls will stop responding and will go completely dead and then after a couple of seconds you'll get controls back however the controls will now be different pushing in on the touch pads will do absolutely nothing rather you have to use the triggers for left click and right click with the left trigger being right click and the right trigger being left click now this is just a weird Quirk of how this was all programmed but if you start steam back up it'll go back to the original controls now because the steam deck is technically a Linux PC it does support external keyboards and mice for the duration of this video I'll be using a Bluetooth mouse and a Bluetooth keyboard in order to make things easier and faster for me if you have either a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard of your own or you have a usba to USBC cable which will let you plug a regular keyboard and mouse into your steam deck you might find that very convenient if you're going to be spending any time customizing and tweaking things in desktop mode however if you don't one thing you should know is how to manually invoke the keyboard the way you do it is by holding the steam button and hitting X this will pop up a virtual keyboard you can then type on with your fingers so why boot up into desktop mode well first of all you can install apps this way outside of steam through the Discover store the Discover store is if you think of it sort of like an app store on your phone it's a third-party downloader that comes pre-installed on the steam deck for you to download free software this is what you'll be using to download and update non-steam applications such as Firefox now there are a couple of important applications that you ought to download and install on your steam deck first of all is one called G edit what G edit is is it's a simple application for editing text files you might have used to this if you need to say edit a config file for a game in order to change some settings that aren't available in game and while the steam deck does come with a text editor by default the one it comes with by default is unusable by mere mortals G edit is a lot simpler so you simply search for in the search bar you'll go over here and I have it already installed so it says removed but you'll see install and you'll just click install and it will download and install it for you the next program you should get is one that's very important it's the one that lets you install custom versions of proton in order to have better compatibility with games it's called proton up Dash QT so simply type that in the search bar and we'll show up over here and then click install once you have it installed you should start it up and install the most recent version of proton GE you can find it here in applications proton up QT there you go I'll start up in this little window and for you by default it will have nothing under installed compatibility tools we're going to want to do is Click add version select proton GE and then it should Auto Select the most recent version available and then simply click install this will download the most recent version of proton GE onto your deck and once done doing this you'll simply be able to select it from that drop down I showed you earlier when in gaming mode if you are having trouble running a game on Steam deck I recommend it the first thing you do is come back to desktop mode grab the most recent version of proton GE and then try using that instead of the default steam one because that could clear out a lot of issues you can also if you have older versions that are unused you can come in here to delete them off of your deck you're probably going to want to do this instead of letting them sit around because each version of proton does take up about one and a quarter gigabytes of space on your steam deck next up I want to talk a little bit about the file browser for the scene deck so this is a PC and you can access all the files just like you could on your computer the file browser is called dolphin you can access it right down here it'll be on the bar by default to do as soon as you open this up is first of all you want to show hidden files a lot of the stuff is hidden by default including very important directories we're going to talk about in a bit so you have to show them in order to Define where they're at the first thing you might be wondering is hey wait a second where's my SD card so it's not super obvious looking here but its under removable devices and this is the SD card but where is it located it's located here in run slash the root directory slash run slash media slash this insane name this is the location of your of your SD card and you can always find it by simply scrolling down to the end here on the bottom now there's some other important folders that you need to know where they are that are not bookmarked by default I have them bookmarked and you're probably going to want to do so too the first one is the Steam folder this contains a number of important folders and is located at root slash home slash deck slash dot local share steam within Steam there is the steam apps folder and this contains two very important folders compact data and Shader cache so I'd like to take a moment to talk about both of these compact data is crucially important and you might want to open this and you might want to bookmark this as well in order to bookmark things you simply go add entry and then you'll copy paste the address over here in order to make a bookmark so in the compact data folder you open it up and it looks like a bunch of gibberish right there's just these files with numbers on them what's all this about well each game has its own compact data folder and these numbers correlate to the steam ID for that game you can actually look up what a steam ID is by using a website called steam DB and typing in the name of the game you want to look up within this folder for each game we'll open up this one you'll find this prefix folder and then this thing called Drive C within Drive C you'll find an entire dummy Windows directory this Windows directory is the only thing that the game sees when it's running because it thinks it's running under windows so if a game has any you know config files you know text files you have to edit if it saves screenshots if it's loading looking the files to run mods or anything like that it will be within the compact data folder for that game and you would find it by finding that game's compact data folder navigating to drive C and then just finding the spot where it would normally have that file on a Windows computer so if you're following a guide online it says something like oh the config file is you know C slash user slash your username and then my documents and then my games and there's some you know game folder in there and then within there is a config file that's where you'll find it on the steam deck so this is very crucial for actually being able to do some of those more PC game type things for going in and messing with config files or installing mods or things of that nature the other folder I said was important is the Shader cache so the steam deck will actually pre-load shaders for games this makes them run without stutters on the steam deck for the most part and it's very helpful except the Shader caches tend to take up quite a bit of space and as of the time of recording the deck doesn't do a very good job of deleting these Shader caches when it's done with them and I believe it actually keeps them even if you uninstall the game so if you have a 64 gigabyte model like I do these Shader caches can get a bit bloated and take up some space so knowing where this folder is and what it's about is very important if you find yourself running out of space and you don't quite know why it says it's under other in the storage category and you're like well I don't have games so taking all the space it's probably Shader caches and you can go in here and just delete some folders for games you don't have installed anymore in order to clean up that space next up I want to talk about adding a non-steam game to steam so you might find yourself for one reason or another wanting to play a game that isn't on steam or you might find yourself wanting to add a an application such as Firefox to steam so you can open it up from within gaming mode how do you do that well you can only do that in desktop mode and you do it the exact same way you would do it under windows you simply open up steam and when you open up from within desktop mode you'll find that it uses the same UI that it does on a desktop you just go down here to add a game add a non-steam game and you'll just navigate to the program from with browse or you'll simply find it in the list and click add so for this example I'm going to add uh we'll add whatever Emoji selector is we're going to add that program and once you've done that you're done you'll find in your library Emoji selector has been added and once you've added it this way you'll be able to boot it up from within gaming mode without having to come back to the desktop mode the last program that I want to talk about is warpinator this is how I move files over easily from my computer to my steam deck and vice versa like everything else you can just install it through the Discover store and once you have it all you have to do is start it up and you can simply drag files onto it on one computer in order to move it over to another computer the windows version of this app is actually called windpinator because it's on Windows but you simply just have to install on multiple computers and then when they're on the same network you can simply drag and drop in order to move files over I find this a lot easier for me than taking the SD card out of my steam deck and putting it into my computer this lets me just do it without having to move things around I just copy things over the Wi-Fi network so if you're looking to copy some things over onto your steam deck say some ROMs or save files or things like that this is a great way to do it now when you're done with desktop mode and you want to return to gaming mode you'll find an icon on your desktop appropriately titled return to gaming mode simply select this and your steam deck will switch over back to gaming mode and finally I want to talk a little bit about troubleshooting some issues on this theme deck as much as I love this device it is very new it's trying to do something a bit crazy and as you've probably heard from the reviews there's a bit of Jank involved and sometimes things just won't work right maybe a game that worked yesterday just fine will just refuse to boot or controls will stop being responsive what do you do when you have these random issues crop up well the first thing you should do and I'm sure you've heard this a million times before is turn it off and on again vast majority of the time I've had issues with the steam deck a simple restart just immediately fixed the issue the next thing to try is if you're having issues with the game is you should try a different proton version you can simply select a different one from the ones valve makes it available to you or you can switch to using the most recent GE proton version or any GE proton version or perhaps you can even look online to see what people have suggested for GE proton versions they've used that have worked just fine for them the next thing you should check if you're having issues is to verify the game files the way you do that is you go down here to properties and local files and you'll see this option for verify Integrity of game files this will cause steam to scan all the files for the entire game and see if something went wrong something you know got corrupted some file went missing and there's any files that are incorrect it will re-download those files and try to fix the install of your game if all that fails and still not working for you then the last tip you have to try is to Simply fully uninstall and reinstall the game as unfortunate as it is I've had people following some of my guides for how to get specific games running on the steam deck and it just wasn't working they were having trouble and the only thing that fixed it for them was just do a full uninstall and full reinstall the game and that got it working I know it's a bit of a pain but sometimes that's just what you got to do now as a bonus troubleshooting tip I want to talk about what do you do if you somehow managed to Brick your deck well you're not completely out of luck valve has an image for the Steam OS available on their website and what you have to do is you simply have to image this onto a USB drive and connect that USB drive to your steam deck via a USBC to USB adapter and you can use that image in order to completely factory restore your steam deck now if you've done something short of bricking the steam deck you also have an option in the deck itself to restart it within settings there's a reset to factory State option that you can use within the system settings most likely if your steam deck is still working you won't have to use this I haven't had to do any sort of factory reset or anything like that but since it is still early days even seven months in you might accidentally have huge problems with your steam deck and a factory reset might be necessary so it's good to know that this option is available to you cover a few bonus tips which don't really fit in any sort of category but are really things you want to know first of all the same deck has a lot of shortcuts for a number of things for instance holding the steam button and hitting R1 will take a screenshot which you can then upload to steam or share in any number of ways now there's a whole bunch of these shortcuts but you don't have to have them memorized pull up a list of all of these shortcuts by holding the steam button and simply holding it in for a couple seconds and it'll pop up this window with all of the shortcuts now you can see there's a lot of useful stuff here like force game shutdown or hitting the Escape key which are both useful for getting out of games if something's gone wrong and something's crashed the other thing I want to talk about is changing the controller order now if you're trying to do something or you're playing the deck either in docked mode or in tabletop mode you have it up on a stand which I have and quite enjoy then you might connect an external controller to the steam deck and that is support for pretty much every controller out there including the Xbox and PlayStation controllers so there's no reason not to however you might run into some issues sometimes where the way the steam deck reports controllers is that it reports its inbuilt controller the one that's built into the system as controller one and any other controllers that it has hooked up over Bluetooth it will report as controllers two three four Etc this can be a bit of a problem with some PC games because not all PC games are programmed with support for multiple controllers connected at once because that's usually not a thing that a lot of people do on PC not only that but you might want to change the control rotor around because well what if you want your controllers to be players one and players too right so if you want to change the controller order in a game you're playing what you do is you hit the quick access menu button while you have a controller connected you'll see this additional button rearrange controller order simply hit this up and you can rearrange the controllers to be in whatever order you want so I've changed it now so my Xbox One controller over Bluetooth will be player one whereas the seam deck itself would be player 2. this lets you arrange the controllers in the order you want for say multiplayer games or to make sure that the controller that you want to be player one is player one for games that only actually support One controller hopefully this video helps you get started tinkering with your steam deck and gives you all the tools and programs and knowledge you need in order to do so I'm planning on making a whole bunch more steam dick videos in the future so if you found this helpful go ahead and subscribe hit the like button so you don't miss out on them and if you have any questions about something that I cover in this video or thoughts on something you'd like you to see me cover in an upcoming video go ahead and leave a comment your comments have been super helpful in helping you figure out what sort of content you want to see in the future so I'm really looking forward to hear what you guys have to say and if you have a friend perhaps who has a steamvix send this video to them so it can help them out as well thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Patrick Hat Trick

Views: 170,250

Keywords: PatrickHatTrick, Steam Deck, steam deck tips, steamdeck, steam deck gameplay, steam deck fps, steamOS, Proton, Proton GE, steam deck guide, Steam deck setup, steam deck configuration, framerate, refresh rate, compatdata, shader cache, linux, valve, ProtonQT, steam deck gaming, handheld, Deck Tech

Id: AABAe3pdK-k

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Neofalcon2]

I've been using my Deck since the first week it was available, and wanted to make a guide covering both all the basics a new Deck owner should know, and also the things that confused and puzzled me when I first tried to get them set up.

In this video, I cover:

• Performance Menu Settings
  
• Installing Applications in Desktop Mode
  
• Using GE Proton
  
• "Compatdata" and Shader Cache folders
  
• Adding a Non-Steam Game
  
• Moving files to the Deck
  
• Changing Controller Order
  
• ...and more!
  

Hopefully this video will be helpful to anyone either new to getting a Steam Deck, or wanting to branch out and begin tinkering with it!

[u/aloushiman]

Saving this for when I get the steam deck! Thank you!

[u/Pantheon1913]

Also saving for later

[u/DisconnectedAG]

Saving this for later. Thanks dog.

[u/Trick_Nebula]

Okay nah whoever made this video snapped 🔥🔥🔥, the pacing, explanation and language used is perfect for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing, And also is good for people who do know what they're doing but need to hear it from someone else too.