Steam Deck Performance Boost with CryoUtilities!

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Retro Game core it's been a minute since I've done a steam deck video and so let's knock one out here today in this one we're going to cover a tool called cryo utilities now this tool has been out for some time and it just upgraded to a 2.0 release two weeks ago and honestly not until very recently did I actually test it out myself personally I've always felt like the optimizations that valve has made inherent to Steam OS are good enough after all they know their device better than anybody else and as a result I'm always a little bit skeptical anytime somebody says they can do it better than Val but after doing quite a bit of research about the whole project I decided to try it out and yeah I think it works really well and it has all the makings of a really good tool number one it is very easy to set up it only takes about two minutes altogether and probably my favorite is the fact that it is set and forget so you only have to do this one time and then you're good to go not only that the person who has made this utility has been a Linux developer for about 16 years at this point and so I feel very comfortable with some of those tweaks that they've made and as I'll show you here in a minute they've done a really good job explaining the whole process themselves and so in this video we're going to install cryo utilities and then give it a test spin to see if we can see any differences between gameplay specifically when it comes to high-end PC games as well as high-end emulation with Nintendo switch and I think you'll find here that the results are not super massive but all the same they are an improvement and considering the fact that it only takes a couple minutes to set up I think it's well worth it and so without any further delay let's Dive Right In oh okay to start cryo utilities was made by Kyle who is behind the cryobite 33 YouTube channel and on his channel he does a lot of deep dives into how to improve specific games or emulators for the steam deck and so if you're the type of person who really wants to dive into the details to get the best performance this is going to be a great channel for you and of course I'll leave this linked below now like I mentioned in the intro Kyle made a 33 minute video that goes over all of cryo utilities 2.0 and in this video he breaks down every single one of the functions that cryo utilities does and why and so in this video here I'm not going to retread the same things he went over because honestly he explains it better than I could either way if you want to learn more about how cryo utilities works and why then I would recommend checking out this video also linked below and while you're there I would recommend subscribing to the YouTube channel in case there are more updates in the future but let's go ahead and install cryo utilities really quickly to start you're going to need to be in desktop mode with your steam deck and I would recommend using a keyboard and mouse if you have one available from there go ahead and open up a web browser either Firefox or maybe Microsoft Edge after that you can search for cryo utilities or you can go to my website retrogamecorp.com and in my steam deck guide I'll have a direct link there as well either way what we're trying to do here is find cryobite33 is GitHub page after that go ahead and scroll down until you get to the readme file here you can read a little bit more about cryo utilities but the place we actually want to find is the one called install here you're going to have a direct link to be able to download the desktop client and just right click on this and select save link as from here I'd recommend throwing it onto your desktop and then go to your desktop and open it up it's going to give you an initial warning that says do you really want to do this and you select yeah man I want to do it from there it's going to run through a script to download and install the cryo utility binary and that's it we've now installed it so now let's actually get it prepped so that we can execute the tool to start you're going to need to have a pseudo or user password for your steam deck if you don't have this set up already the easiest way to do this is to open up console which starts with a K here on your device and then within this terminal window type in the word password p-a-s-swd from there press enter and if you don't have one set up already it's going to ask you to set up a password now I've already done one and so because of that it's going to ask me if I want to change my current password but as you type in your password you're not going to see any characters or anything else like that but it's still working anyway after you've established your sudo password you are now good to go you can now close out of console and then we'll open up cryo utilities to start you're going to get a quick disclaimer you can press yes here to accept the terms and then it's going to ask you for that suit little password that we just set up after you've added that you will get the front page of cryo utilities and if you watch Kyle's video he walks you through this whole process but at the end of the day all you really have to do is just tap on this recommended button right here this will apply all the settings that he recommends also if note here if you ever want to switch back all you have to do is just press that stock button below it so let's go ahead and get started we're going to tap on the recommended button here and depending on how your steam deck is set up this could take anywhere from like two minutes all the way to 30 minutes so just go ahead and grab a cup of coffee and then wait here anyway after it's done it's going to say you've successfully applied those recommended settings and if you go into the swap in memory tabs you should now see a bunch of text that's highlighted in green if it's green that means you are now using his recommended settings now while we're in here let me talk a little bit about the storage tab because this is something you may want to go back to here you can do two things the top button will actually sync your game data depending on where the game is actually stored so for example if you're storing games in your SD card what it'll do is it'll move all the shaders over to the SD card as well and this this could actually help with removing stutters when you're playing a game below that you have the ability to clean out your game data for example when you uninstall a game from Steam OS it does not delete all the Shader cache for every game this tool is going to allow you to delete any of that Shader cache for games that you've already uninstalled and so periodically you may want to do this and save yourself a little bit of storage space and finally let's talk a little bit about vram by default steamos uses one gigabyte of video RAM but in coordination with the other tweaks that we've already done through cryo utilities Kyle actually recommends that you use four gigs instead now this is unfortunately something you cannot do within cryo utilities you have to do it yourself so let me show you how to do that really quick and to do this all you have to do is hold down to the volume up button and then press the power button to start up the machine once you hear the little steam deck Boop sound you can go ahead and remove your fingers from the buttons after that you're going to get access to these four menu options we want to select the one here on the bottom right to access this you can move your trackpad and then use R2 to actually click on it this will bring you into the setup you utility window what we want to do here is go into the advanced section and then near the bottom there is a Uma frame buffer size what you want to do is click on this and then change that from one gigabyte to four and really that's all you have to do from there you can press the select button to exit and save your changes and then the steam deck is going to reset itself and you should be back in the main Steam OS menu and to verify the amount of vram you can go into settings and then system and then you can scroll all the way down until you find the vram size in a Chanel B four gigabytes and so with all that out of the way let's get into the testing next on the top you're going to see cryo utilities turned off and with the default one gigabyte vram size and then of course on the bottom you will see cryo utilities turned on with the vram of four gigabytes also bear in mind that for my PC games I'm actually pushing them beyond the settings of the steam deck and so for example here I'm running God of War at 800p but on original settings and with no FSR and that's because I'm actually trying to push the steam deck a little bit beyond what it's capable of so we can see a difference between the performance generally I would recommend actually playing this game in low settings either way as you can see between these stats on the top and the bottom we're not getting a big difference here in fact the only one that's really a stark difference is the amount of ram being used in general I found that I was using about two gigabytes of RAM less when using cryo utilities now when it comes to the frames for a second which you can see on the right we don't see a lot of difference here and honestly it's kind of hard to actually capture this because I'm not playing the exact same thing at the exact same time and so when it comes down to it for a couple games especially God of War as well as Marvel Spider-Man I didn't see a huge difference between the frame rate for either there were definitely times when I got a more consistent frame rate that was higher for either game but I would also see similar dips in the frame rate here and there even with cryo utilities on however the main difference that I actually felt when it came to the gameplay was a little bit intangible in the fact that it just felt a little bit smoother yes I was still getting some frame rate drops here and there but I was getting a lot fewer stutters when those dips actually happen I think Spider-Man's a really good example because anytime you take a really tight turn seems to dip just a little bit every time but I found that with cryo utilities on and with those four gigabytes of vram it was just a more smoother experience and considering the fact that we're actually using less resources we're having less Ram being utilized and the GPU CPU seems to be just about the same if not a little bit lower this seems to be a net benefit all around not only are we getting smoother gameplay but we might also have a lower performance tax too which means a longer battery life in the end now for other games it was a more stark contrast for example with Elden ring I definitely felt a lot smoother of a gameplay experience especially when in combat typically when in high settings I found a lot of stutter especially when fighting an enemy and honestly that's probably the most important part that you don't want to have stutters and so in particular when it came to playing Elden ring I found this to be a much more enjoyable experience foreign about is that in Horizon zero Dawn it actually reduces a lot of stutters that are inherent to this game on the steam deck now I've also heard that these stutters occur later on in the game and I'm only about an hour into the game so I can't really show that off here and honestly I already played through the PS4 version and so I don't think I'm going to be playing it again either way as you can see we're getting a pretty stable 40 frames per second but again we're having a much lower RAM utilization anywhere from two to three gigabytes at any time and so at least in my very preliminary testing here yes there's not a huge difference when it comes to frames per second but there was a tangible difference in overall smoothness especially with these higher end games on the steam deck now I do a lot of emulation on my steam deck in fact this is probably where I play most of my Nintendo switch games overall and so we're going to take the five most common games that I play right now and do the same testing for those now before we get started into that there is one other setting tweak I need to talk about and that is smt or simultaneous multi-threading by default steamos has this on which means that all eight threads are gonna run at 1 once while playing any game and that generally will work very well for PC games but when it comes to emulation it's not really the case for a lot of emulators especially for Nintendo switch PlayStation 2 Playstation 3 and Nintendo GameCube in Wii all those actually do better when you use fewer threads and text them more and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a great example on the top we're using the default Steam OS settings and as you can see it's using about one to one and a half watts of CPU power at any time however when I turn off that simultaneous multi-threading instead of using eight cores we're only using four as you can see the CPU is being more heavily taxed but we're getting a much smoother gameplay experience and to set this up we're going to use a plugin called power tools and I'll show you how to install it here really quick in case you haven't already installed it now I am going to make one assumption here and that you probably already have emu deck installed if you're going to be running emulators and if you haven't installed emu deck I have an entire tutorial for it also linked below regardless the easiest way to set up power tools is to install it via emu deck so we're going to go ahead and open up the Emu deck tool that you should have on your desktop and then once it's loaded up you're going to go and select the tools and stuff option here on the bottom from there the very first option you have is called power tools and again here you're going to need to add that pseudo password that we set up earlier and the installation process is super simple all you have to do is type in your password and then select install power tools from there just give it a minute and then on the top right you should get a notification that says that power tools was installed after that you're good to go go ahead and exit out of Emmy deck and then boot back into Steam OS now when you start up a Nintendo switch game just go ahead and press the three button icon on the right of your controller and that'll bring up the steam Quick Settings here now on the bottom you should have a little plug-in icon go ahead and select that and then select the power tools option here from there the second option is going to be smt what you want to do here is toggle this off and when you do that you should see the number of threads reduced from eight to four and that's it that's all you really have to do just make sure you do this every time you start up a Nintendo switch game and so now that we have an Apples to Apples comparison we're going to turn off cryo utilities on the top and then turn on cryo utilities and four gigabytes of vram here on the bottom and in both of these cases we are going to turn the smt off and what I found with the Yuzu emulator in particular is that the performance difference here is very similar to high-end PC games and so as before we'll see less Ram utilized with the cryo utilities on and then here and there you will see less CPU and gpus usage but not by a lot now when it comes to actually playing these games I'm going to play them all in dock mode in order to Max this out as much as possible but when it came to frame rate it was basically the same experience I was still definitely getting dips here and there especially with certain games like Super Mario Odyssey but at the same time I found that I had reduced stutters overall with cryo utilities on and so yeah I would say My overall experience here is very similar to how it is when trying to play high-end games on the steam deck as well yes we are going to save a little bit of resources when it comes to overall utilization but the real difference here is kind of intangible in the fact that it just results in smoother gameplay and again it is kind of hard to show the difference here on the screen because this stutter happens so quickly and it's also very hard to play the exact same thing on the exact same game between the two really when it comes down to it if you're looking for a numbers comparison between the two I think the cryobite 33 video he already did does that really well so if you are looking for things like charts and graphs then that's the video I'd recommend checking out at least for me when it comes to my own gameplay experience I did feel a tangible difference between the two but it's not something that's gonna like change my life overnight however as we start to wrap things up here that's kind of the beauty of cryo utilities yes I would say that it does improve the performance and only by a little bit when it comes to the numbers at least in my own experience but for me it does two very important things number one it gives me smoother gameplay overall and then number two I can set this whole thing up in about two minutes altogether and of course the best thing about it is that after you do it you don't really have to deal with it ever again in the end if you're wondering whether or not I recommend cryo utilities I think that's a very easy yes after all it's very easy to install and comes with a bunch of upsides with no down sites either so let me know what you think in the comments Below have you tried out cryo utilities and which games work best and also be sure to check out the cryobite 33 YouTube page if you want to learn more about cryo utilities and how it actually works as for me yeah I'm really happy that I found the tool and I'm definitely leaving it on my steam deck as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 184,871

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Id: 7RPAxT7HJ7Q

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023