Steam Deck Tips, Fixes, and Accessories Updated 2024

today's video is going to be a little bit different I want to show you as many tips and tricks as I can about the steam deck starting with how you can adjust your vram in order to adjust your vram you're going to want to turn off your steam deck so the first thing that you're going to do is you're going to press the steam button and you're going to come down to power once you've hit power you're going to shut down and while that's shutting down I'm going to explain exactly what we're doing the reason that we're doing this is because some games require more power to the GPU than they do the CPU the steam dag has what's called an APU which means it shares Ram between the a the CPU and the GPU some games require more power to the GPU and more R to the GPU and you have the ability to change that if you want so now that we've got our steam deck shut off we're going to hold down the volume up button and we're going to press the power button on our steam deck you can see that the light turned on and now we can see that we've got a boot logo once that boots up we want to come over here to the setup utility once that goes into this window you're going to come down to Advanced and then you're going to look for frame buffer size currently it's set to 1 gig by default you have the ability to change it to 256 megabytes 512 1 GB 2 GB or 4 GB now you should probably experiment and see which setting works best for the games that you're playing once you've decided on it you can set it and leave it where it is but if you ever change your mind you can always come back over here on the left hand side come down to restore defaults so that you can undo any changes that you're not happy with once you are happy with the changes that you've made you're going to go ahead and hit exit saving changes it's going to say are you sure and you're going to say absolutely I'm sure you hit the button and now you've got your vram set to whatever it is that you decided to set It app tip number two you might want to install cryo utilities cryo utilities is a set of scripts and utilities written by Kyle AKA cryy 33 he is a friend of the show and he used to be a regular member on the nerd Nest podcast so I do trust this utility if you want to install it I'm going to leave a link to his web page down below as well as a link to a full tutorial that Kyle made all down in that description down below that like button so make sure that you check that out let's talk about charging your Steam deck this the steam deck comes with its own charger which is awesome the LCD deck came with a slightly shorter cord and the um OLED steam deck came with a longer cord and it's wonderful that they extended the length of that cord on the steam deck but I'm sorry can just give me one second what are you doing back there I'm looking for a charger I'm trying to do a video sorry it's downstairs well I guess since he brought it up I should talk about the sponsor of the video ug green we have a lot of tech here in the nerd nest and they all come with their own power bricks like I was just mentioning for the steam deck but all of those power bricks are kind of terrible they only charge one thing at a time they don't have detachable cords so if there's something wrong with the cord you got to buy a whole new thing they're prongs don't fold down so you got to worry about them scratching something in your desk or in your bag I mean overall they're massive and they just they're they're not good that's why I love ugreen Chargers everything I hate about the other chargers doesn't exist with ugen this is the nexe x 160 W charger from ugreen with three USB C ports and one usba a port this charger provides 160 WTS of total output you can fast charge your laptop phone and tablet all at the same time it's small it's light it's powerful in fact it's 21% smaller than the original 140 W charger I often use it to charge my MacBook which can go from 0 to 50% in just 27 minutes whenever my family goes on trips we always bring you green Chargers with us in order to keep our stuff topped off so if you want to keep your Tech topped off the fast and easy way then click on the link in the description down below and a huge thank you to you green for sponsoring this video since we're talking about traveling with your steam deck I figure I should probably bring up cases and there's quite a few different options for travel cases it's awesome that the steam deck comes with a case but honestly I find that case to be just a little bit bulky so let's say that you are looking for something that's a little more formfitting uh I would suggest this case from tomt and as with all of uh the stuff in this video there will be links in the description down below uh this case is really nice it got it it fits the steam deck pretty well it's fairly thin it comes with something that can cover up the screen which I really like and it's got little cutouts for your thumb sticks which is great um I find this to be really fantastic I feel like it's going to protect the steam deck pretty well and it's very very thin now if you want something that's a little more rugged I would suggest the project kill switch case from dbrand this is really cool although dbrand did get into some hot water when they first released this because the kickstand that they had on the back was magnetically attached but they went back to the drawing board after they made that mistake and they made it so that it's no longer magnetically attached it attaches by this twisting mechanism one cool thing about the kickstand is it has a spot right here and here in order for you to put SD cards in there so if you have extra SD cards that you want to bring with you you have a safe place to store them and they even have little little switches that you can uh push to release them once they're locked in let me go ahead and put my kickstand back on and we'll flip over to the other side um here you can see I've taken the cover off of my dbrand case it's got a little dbrand logo there the the they did a great job designing this it's absolutely top-notch quality I personally don't use it only because I prefer a naked steam deck I prefer not to have a case when I'm playing that being said for about 6 months this was on my steam deck and I just never put it on my OLED steam deck once I got the OLED one the is fantastic because it covers the the triggers up here so you don't have to worry about your triggers getting damaged you don't have to worry about your joysticks getting damaged overall I think the dbrand did a great job with this case now if you're throwing your steam deck into a backpack I suggest one of those other cases but if you are throwing your steam deck not in a backpack but you still want to take your steam Deck with you then I have this case from tomt this is really fantastic when I go places and I'm not bringing my steam deck I often use this as a camera bag but it was made with the steam deck in mind so let's take a look at it right here um there's lots and lots of room in here in fact there's enough room in here that you can fit your steam deck which I'll put in right now let me turn the screen off there we go you can fit your steam deck in here and there is still room in here for an entire Nintendo switch plus a battery pack so this is a really great steam deck case if you want to just carry just your electronics in a separate bag I highly recommend this that being said if you are somebody who prefers to have things just be a little bit more slim than uh this case is the one that I would recommend let's talk shortcuts anytime that you were forgetting what shortcuts you have if you hold down the quick access menu button it will bring those up it will also work if you're holding down the steam button which is great first off let's say that you want to kill a game that is not running properly usually I'll hit the steam button and I'll come over here and I'll go down to exit Game but sometimes a game is just hanging up and it can't figure out what it's supposed to do next in which case you're going to hold down Steam and press B and that will actually kill the game that is running let's see if that works there we go the game just died on me if you want to take a screenshot if you hold down the steam button and then press R1 it's going to take a screenshot I I'm not sure why valve did it this way but in order to share that screenshot there's a whole bunch of different steps that you're going to take so I'm going to go into my steam menu I'm going to come down here to media and you can see the screenshot that I just took so if I come down here and I press the a button it's going to show me my whole uh screenshot and then if I press the start button I have my options I'm going to go ahead and hit upload it's going to ask me what I need to do to upload it so I'm going to say that I want it to be public and I'm going to hit confirm and now it says that I've uploaded my screenshot I'm going to go ahead and hit back and if I go back into my media I should be able to see uh my screenshots right there you also have the ability to go into there and hit share and you have a few different ways to share one of them I did not know about until I was getting ready to make this video and that is to share it via a QR code which is really strange so if I want to share that screenshot I can click that button it's going to bring up a QR code and I can just grab my phone and bring up my QR code scanner and you can see right there and then there's a share button I can click on that share sheet and I can share that screenshot with whatever app that I want without having to actually do anything on my steam deck which is a really really handy way to share your screenshot let's say that you are going to be spending some extra time in desktop mode I'm going to highly recommend that you get yourself a mouse and keyboard if you're only going to be in desktop mode for a short time I recommend that you pick up one of these I just got this the other day it is called the fosmon um Bluetooth Mini keyboard I'll leave a link to in the description down below this is really handy because number one it's got Mouse buttons here and here you've got a trackpad you also have Mouse buttons right here you can do page up and page down for scrolling and you have access to a physical keyboard it just makes things so much easier and this has a permanent spot next to me on my couch over there so that when I do dock my steam deck I still have access to all of this stuff if I need it that being said if I'm sitting at a desktop and actually using the steam deck you know in desktop mode for any length of time then I highly suggest you connect to a real keyboard and mouse and my favorite keyboard right now is the Kyron q1 H which is this monster right here and I call it a monster because it is so heavy it has a RGB back lighting although I have that turned off right now I love the color scheme that they have going on you can connect it either via Bluetooth oh you can't see this because of my camera is in locked down Focus so we'll try it like that you can connect it via Bluetooth via cable or via 2.4 GHz um dongle you can set it to Windows or Mac and it's uh charged via USBC uh another thing that I like about it is it's it connects to three different Bluetooth systems whenever you want so my Windows PC is usually Bluetooth bluet 1 my steam deck or some other device that I need to use it with is usually um Bluetooth 2 and then I usually connect my Mac via Bluetooth 3 and then I reserve the 2.4 GHz wireless dongle for in case one of those doesn't work for whatever reason cuz you know Bluetooth can be fairly finicky it also has a little volume dial right here which you can turn up and down and I think I just turned down my Windows PC by accident but overall this thing is fantastic and it is heavy as hell it's very very heavy you probably notice that right down here I've got buttons that are corresponding to the Mac it also comes with Windows buttons so that you can flip uh swap those out if you want but if you're going to be on your steam deck using desktop mode for any length of time then that's my recommendation is to get a real keyboard like this one I'll leave a link in the description down below then you've got your mouse this is the Logitech mxm 3 I use it all the time not a gaming mouse but it has these two scroll Wheels which I absolutely love all right moving on from keyboard and mouse let me just put this thing back over here and since we're in desktop mode already let's talk about muud deck muud deck is uh basically a set of scripts that will automatically set up your steam deck for emulation that means playing all of your old games it's super easy to do and honestly it could not be easier all you have to do is open up your browser once that opens up you're going to bring up your keyboard Steam X just like I told you before I'm going to tap in here and I'm going to type in muud I'm going to hit enter and I'll hide my keyboard and it says emulation Made Easy on Steam OS it could not be easier I have a tutorial about how to do it but honestly you don't need the tutorial it's that easy so simply download it run it follow the directions put your ROMs in the right place and you are all set when the steam deck first came out I would say that steam input was a step down from where it had used to be but over time valve has put in the work and really done a lot to improve steam input and honestly I think this next tip there's going to be a lot of people who've never seen this before because it's something that's very very easy to miss so let's say that I'm assigning buttons for a game like Rogue Legacy 2 I'm going to go ahead and jump into Rogue Legacy 2 I'm going to jump into my inputs I'm going to edit my layout and this is very cool because here I have um you know I'm going to set a button but guess what you don't even have to go into that that menu you can just push the start button and it tells the the system to listen what do you want that button to do now I probably wouldn't do it with the B button but I might come down here to the back grips like right here I have my R4 is the left bumper but maybe I want my L4 to be the left bumper all I have to do is hit listen and then I'm going to hit the button that I want it to do bam left bumper that's so much better than the way it used to be I'm going to go ahead and remove that command what what you used to have to do is you would come up here and then you would go into this menu and you would say oh I want it to be left bumper or you would go into that menu and then you would go over to the keyboard and you would say I want that to be the F button since we're talking about steam input let me show you another trick you can do with steam input and that's turbo buttons I'm lazy why would I want to put p a button over and over and over when I could just hold that button down instead that's where extra commands comes into play in Steam input here you can see I'm playing Rogue Legacy 2 I'm going to hit the steam button I'm going to come down here to my controller settings and I'm going to go into my settings edit layout and my attack button um well actually hold on that's wrong there we go my attack button is currently X so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the gear icon and I'm going to switch this over I'm going to add an extra command and that extra command is going to be a Gamepad command and it's going to be X bam now I have X but it's also X depending on what I'm doing here that doesn't make any sense well I'm going to come down here to my extra um command and I'm going to hit the gear icon and I'm going to change it from a regular press to a long press press and then now that it's under long pressed I'm going to go into settings and I'm going to hit hold to repeat turbo so now if I hit start or not start but steam uh you can see that if I if I press x i attack but if I hold X it spams it for me now what you might not be able to what you absolutely can't tell is when I'm spamming this I have a haptic feedback that is telling me b Bam Bam Bam I'm I'm spamming this button for you and I can feel every time that the button gets pushed if you are running into issues where it's going too fast for you you can hit Steam and you can come down here to that turbo button and you go into the gear icon and settings and you can do the repeat rate and I can slow down the repeat rate so I'm going to go ahead and slow down the repeat rate I'm going to hit done going to hit Steam and I'm going to test it all right it's happening much slower and so that's maybe that's what I'm trying to dial in for this particular game so now I can either hit my button or I can hold it down and have it attack that way but you're not limited to just turbo buttons you can also go in here and I can set another whoops another extra command add extra command and I'm going to set that to be another game pad button uh maybe I'll have it be a and uh if I go over over here to my gear I'm going to change it from a regular press to a double press so now if I if I press X it's going to attack if I hold X it's going to spam attack and if I double tap X it's going to press a for me this isn't something that I would do in this game but it's an easy game to show off exactly what's happening when I do those different moves that's extra commands now let's take a look at sub commands extra commands allow you attach a bunch of different commands to one button extra commands allow you to press two buttons at the same time this comes in really handy when you are doing a keyboard uh command so let me go into my um controller settings and edit layout and I'm going to come down here let me get rid of these by the way a lot of people will think that you need to go into the gear icon and then come down to settings and then delete the command you don't have to do that look right here remove command just by pressing X so I'm going to press X reset activation reset delete extra command gone so much easier cleaning up your inputs when you are just using that instead of going through a bunch of menus I'm going to do that for the other one because I don't really need all those extra ones but let's say that I want double tapping y button to press shift space not something that I think I would ever do in Rogue Legacy but I'm going to show you how to do that uh basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my y button I'm going to add an extra command I'm going to come down here to keyboard and I'm going to press space so now when I press my y button it's going to press the space key but I don't actually want that I want it to be a double tap so I'm going to switch that from a regular press to a double tap and that's going to push my space key but that's still did not actually make the shift space so now under this command I'm going to go to my gear icon and I'm going to add a sub command and that sub command is going to be another button that gets pushed at the same time that I push that space button in this case shift so now you can see that it's kind of nested with the sub command underneath my extra command so what happens now is if I press the Y button I get the Y button but if I double press the Y button I get shift space now in this particular game it's not going to actually do anything because I don't think shift space does anything in Rogue Legacy but now you know how to set up subcommand and extra commands and if you want more details on sub commands and extra commands I have an entire tutorial about it which I will link in the description down below that like button vampire survivors is one of my favorite recent games that have come out and it plays fantastically well on the steam deck but when you're playing that game sometimes you're you know moving around and and suddenly you're like oh I'm going to stop and take a drink and you reach over to get your drink with your left hand you got to take your thumb off the stick but you just want to keep playing what if you want to use the right stick to control instead well that's super easy go into the steam menu go into your controller settings go to edit layout come down here to joysticks and then go down here to your right joystick and if you click on this little gear icon you can then say output the right joystick and I'm going to switch that to the left joystick and now my right joystick does the same thing that my left joystick does so now when I'm playing Vampire survivors I can switch back and forth between which hand I'm using while I'm playing the game it maybe it's useless but I think it's cool now many of you have probably heard me talk about flick stick before but if you haven't I'll explain what it is in just a second for those of you that have heard me talk about flick stick before I don't think you're going to want to skip this because for every single game that you play if you're using flick stick you need to calibrate each game specifically for flick stick based on the game and there's a new way to do that with which is way easier than it's ever been before let me show you how it is but first I want to show everybody who doesn't know what flick stick is what it is so here I'm playing Doom 2 on my steam deck and you can see that the right joystick it acts like a regular right joystick if I push to the left my character looks to the left and so on but what I want to do here is I'm just going to move forward so I can point directly at that pillar at the end of the hallway down there and now what I want to do is I'm going to hit Steam and I'm going to come over here and I'm going to turn on flick stick and then I'm going to hit steam again so how does flick stick work well instead of pushing left in order to look left this snaps to the left it makes it much faster to snap so I'm looking directly to the left now I'm looking directly to the right basically I can show it to you the best way this way is I can turn this around and to look behind me it's going to go all the way around which seems kind of crazy but that's because it is not currently calibrated properly let me just make sure I'm looking right in the middle dead center in that in that pillar so if I want to calibrate this properly I'm going to go into the steam menu and I cannot believe it took them this long to do it because this is so brilliant I wish that I had thought of it myself I'm going to temporarily assign the Y button going to go up here to camera and I'm going to say turn camera 360° and it says here this action will spin the camera by 360° horizontally by sending out 360 worth degrees worth of mous Mouse pixels over the duration of the turn the dots per 360 setting determines how many pixels that is so this action must be used in conjunction with the gyro to mouse or flick stick modes okay so now that I've got that set up I'm going to come down here to confirm and then I'm going to go back to my joysticks and flick stick is currently set to turn 6,545 pixels is 1 360° turn which is probably way too many I'm going to close this I'm going to press Y and I did not end up facing the same direction your goal is to face the same direction when you're done so I think that I'm going way too much and what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit Steam and I'm going to reduce this 2545 instead now and close that I'm going to press y okay that turned me all the way around but it didn't turn me around enough so instead of I going I went too far down now I'm going to increase it first I got to get back right in the middle in the middle of that pillar there I hit Steam and I'm going to increase this um there we go by the way if you didn't know you can tap on this and you can just type in your value currently it's set to 25 45 I'll try 3,000 done I'm going to close this press y that's too much steam we're we're going to go 2,600 done look back at the middle of the pillar press y not enough so I got to increase a little bit so maybe okay so I can't increase it that way so I'm going to go 2700 done get lined up press y little bit higher maybe 2750 joysticks flick stick I'm going to fast forward through this while I do it so that you can see basically the process but I'm going to go real fast [Music] once you think you've got it nailed in here's what you're going to do you're going to keep that set to 360° Spin and you're just going to push it a bunch of times and you should end up pretty much in the same place every single time once you've got it calibrated properly you can go back into your settings uh hop back out to buttons and set this back to your y button and now when you play your game this is really cool if I want to look right I'm going to just flick to the right I'm going to look 90° to the to the right 90° to the left 90° to the left looking behind me if I want to look behind me completely flip it back down it's going to take me right back to where I was facing if you use flick stick in combination with gyro you can use the right stick for fast movements like this and then you can really dial in exactly what you're trying to shoot at with the gyro which I don't have set up because it's doomed 2 why bother speaking of the trackpads you also have the ability to add virtual menus to the track pads which are incredibly useful for games that have a lot of different keyboard commands in order to do that I'm going to press the steam button and then I going going to my controller settings and once I'm in controller settings edit layout and I'm going to come all the way down here to Virtual menus under virtual menu I'm going to add virtual menu and I'm going to go ahead and name my virtual menu subscribe and I'm going to hit confirm and now I'm going to have a couple of different options for my virtual menus I can choose a radial menu a touch menu or a hot Bar menu the hot Bar menu I have not found a use for if you know what what hot bar menus are use useful for let me know in the comment section down below that like button but uh radio menus I feel like they're best to be put on a a uh joystick so that you can flick the joystick it'll pop up a menu and you can choose from that I'll show you that in a little bit but a touch menu is what we're actually setting up so I'm going to press touch menu and now over here I'm going to edit my touch menu and I'm going to start adding commands so in Manor Lords which is the game that I'm playing right now the C button is the construction button uh I'm going to add another virtual menu I'm going to go up to my keyboard and the M button is another button that I may need to hit and um we'll do one more and I think the R button is another button that I might be using in Manor Lords I can't remember off the top of my head but here you can see I've got a bunch I've now got my menu and you can see over here on the left hand side what that menu is going to look like so let me hit the steam button and if I touch the oh you know what i' never assigned it to a trackpad so that's a mistake I made now the next thing that I need to do is I got to go down to a trackpad and I'm going to send my my um that's my right trackpad I'm going to set my left trackpad to a virtual menu which is labeled or called subscribe so I'm going to click on that and now when I'm in my game if I touch that it's going to bring up my menu and I have the option to press C press M or press R now currently I have it set to where I hold it it disappears and it doesn't actually send that input until I click in and then it brings up my construction menu if I hit the R button it's going to bring up a different menu and if I hit the M button it's going to bring up my map I close my map now I'm going to hit the steam button again and I'm going to go into my virtual menus going to look at my my subscribe menu and I want to change how that works so if I go into um my gear icon I can say that that is going to be release press basically what that means is it's going to send that input when I release for the c key but only for the c key so if I want to bring up the c key I Mouse over it and I let go and it brings it up if I push the m key I Mouse over it I push down it sends push down again it goes away the c key I push down nothing happens until I release and then it brings it up a few other options that you get to do with the touch menu is I can assign a graphic for the touch menu if I click on that I get to pick a symbol whatever symbol I want I'll just pick a random symbol I can change the foreground color and the background color I'll set that to green with a light blue background because that couldn't be more hideous and I'm going to hit done and now you can see that that's the icon that's going to be sent for the c key so if I hit Steam and bring it up and now it's got an icon instead of the C button and you can see right above that it says C now I don't want it to say C I want it to tell me what it actually does so I'm going to go in here I'm going to hit the gear button and I'm going to come down to rename command and I'm going to type in construct so now when I hit this it says construct and tells me what button it is so you can do a million things with that one of the coolest things about PC gaming and the steam deck is the non-stop sales you're going to save so much money when you are playing games on your steam deck because we constantly have deals and sales and awesome websites like Humble Bundle in order to get game seems really really cheap just just yesterday I got like Yakuza like a dragon and Hi-Fi rush for $12 plus I think it was like five other games with this month's humble Choice there is a link in the description down below it is an affiliate link just so that we're being completely transparent but I'm here to tell you humble bundle's fantastic and steam sales are fantastic and that is one of the things about the steam deck that is so good is you get so many games really cheap now I've said a million times that gyro is absolutely fantastic but sometimes you need to calibrate gyro because there might be something off with it for instance here I want to show you what it's like when gyro is not properly calibrated I've got I'm running entropy Center here and I've got gyro turned on and as soon as I touch that you can see that it starts moving that's because my gyro is not calibrated properly so I'm going to kill the game uh I'll try that again I'm going to kill that game and then I'm going to press the steam button I'm going to come down to settings and under settings I'm going to come all the way down to controller and down here I'm going to go to calibration and advanced settings I'm going to click open and now I'm going to go to gyro calibration you can see that they're all off by just a little bit so it says down here P um Pitch yaah and roll speeds should be very close to zero when the controller is on a stationary surface if any bias to One Direction controls will drift in game click calibrate to correct for that drift so all of these sliders should be fairly close to zero and if they're not what you want to do is you want to press this calibrate button right down here it's going to tell you to post it on a stable control uh surface and then just leave it alone and now that the calibration is done if I load back into entropy Center we should be able to see if if I've fixed my drift so here I've got my steam deck on a perfectly level surface and I'm going to touch the activator and you can see it is no longer drifting so it looks like we fixed our issue one thing that drives me crazy is when I'm playing a game and I constantly get notifications I don't mind getting notifications if someone's sending me a message but getting notifications when somebody is just playing a game is not something that I've ever been interested in so if you press the steam button over on the left hand side of the screen you can come all the way down to settings and under settings you can come down to your notifications and you can set your notifications to never you can you can customize it exactly how you want whether or not it's going to play a sound or show a toast I'm going to set it to Anytime and then I'm going to say when a friend joins a game don't show a toast I don't need to know when that happens when I see receive a chat message yes show something send a sound when I see receive a chat room notification do those things but when a friend comes online starts playing a game I don't need to be notified of that stuff unless they actually want to get a hold of me now that I've got that set let's actually take a look at the quick access menu over here on the right hand side that's the three dots or the ellipses menu or as I like to sometimes call it the dead snowman because he's laying on his side I'm going to hit that button and it's going to bring up uh my notifications which are all the way up here at the top it's got my friends list right there and right here is my performance over overlay the performance overlay that I like is performance overlay level two and it's got some really good information here like as you can see I've got my frames per second currently sitting around 40 I've got my frame time so I can see if it's jumping up or down really quickly I can see how much the GPU or I'm sorry that that CPU is being used and how much the GPU is being used how much RAM is being used how much vram I'm currently using my battery life how much how many wats that I'm currently using currently I'm using 8.6 Watts on here and I'll show you how you can change that later and what time it is now speaking of later later is now so let's actually adjust how many watts are being used I'm going to come down here and I'm going to set a TDP limit you can see that my TDP limit is currently sitting at 5 Watts why is it 5 Watts well here's the reason why the last time I played a game it was a game that didn't require a lot of power so I set the the steam deck to just use 5 watts of power which is great because that means is the batter is going to last a really long time however what I forgot to do is set a per game performance profile so if I come up here to per game profile I want to set that to on and now it's just going to set whatever settings that I change here in the quick access menu it's only going to set that for when I'm playing entropy Center and you can see as soon as I hit that it loaded in my entropy Center profile and my frames per second jumped up 260 and my frame time graph flattened out and got really really nice and flat the reason for that is because if you come down here you can see that my TDP my TDP limit is set to off currently I have it set to on and now it's set to off now setting it to on and leaving it 15 watts does absolutely nothing but if I lower how many watts I'm using and I close this uh you should see some issues in the frame time although I guess I didn't lower it quite enough so I'm going to lower it all the way down to 3 watts and now you can see oh man that is real real bad so let's go ahead and increase that TDP limit I'm going to increase it to 6 watts and now I'm up to almost 60 frames per second so you get to control how many watts are being used now that might actually confuse you because if you look here I've got it set to using six Watts but it says it's using 9.5 Watts at this point well that's because it doesn't take into account how many watts the screen is using or a couple of other things this is just showing how much wattage is available for your games so by adjusting your TDP limit you can adjust what kind of performance you're getting and you can increase your battery life quite a bit now something else that is designed to increase your battery life is half rate shading I've never really had good uh experience turning that on so I almost never turn it on for any reason allowing tearing is something that you might want to do if you want to decrease your input lag uh so if I want to increase allow tearing that's going to allow the game to have kind of a mismatch between the frame and the refresh and it's going to cause like a line to go through the screen but here's the thing because the steam deck is a portrait screen turned sideways instead of a um landscape screen the tearing is vertical and it's a little bit less noticeable than when the tearing goes side to side so if you're ever experiencing some bad input lag you can experiment with allowing ing to be turned on um I'm going to go ahead and turn off my TDP limit as well and let's move down to scaling mode down here another way that you can customize the performance of the games that you're playing is using scaling you can run your games at a lower resolution and then use upscaling in order to run those to to make those games look like they're running at a higher resolution and you can get to those options here in the performance tab down here under scaling mode you got your your integer fit stretch and fill and then your scaling fix uh filter which is linear pixel FSR or NIS I suggest that on a game by game basis you test those out and see which ones work best for you another thing that's really cool that valve did is they allow us to adjust our refresh rate and frames per second of each game individually here you can see that it's running at 90 frames per second and 90 Hertz that's the refresh rate of theen screen is the 90 HZ and the frame rate of the game is the FPS and I'm going to adjust this down to 30 frames per second and it's going to go black for a second and then turn back on or maybe it won't because I didn't change the refresh rate of the screen so here this is showing that I am going to be re um getting 30 frames every single second and my screen is refreshing at 90 HZ that means that I will see every one of those 30 frames three times because 3 * 3 is 90 if I lower this down to 40 frames per second or I guess raise it to 40 frames per second my screen will turn black for a second and now you can see that it's at 80 HZ and you're probably seeing all kinds of flickering because of a mismatch between the the the uh refresh rate of the screen and the camera that you're looking at right now this is going to allow me to play my game at 40 frames per second and I will see every frame twice that means that those two are in match and it's going to feel really really smooth when I play I'm going to go ahead and increase this back up to 90 HZ and you can see that a lot of that flickering goes away although you can still kind of see this banding going across I can't see that in real life I only see it on my monitor that I'm looking at my my screen on when the steam deck shipped it shipped without a way for you to lock your steam deck which is one of the things that I said was a huge mistake M AK that valve had made but they fixed it almost instantaneously if you want to lock your steam deck you go to the steam you come down to your settings you're going to go down to security and over here you're going to use a lock screen and you can turn on that lock screen and then pick a pin 1 2 3 4 5 [Music] 6 and then I'm going to repeat that pin 1 2 3 4 5 six and now I'm going to sleep the steam deck and I'm going to turn it back on and when it comes back up it's going to ask me for my pin 2 3 4 5 6 and there you have it if you want to turn it off you're going to have to put your pin in again and now I've turned it off you can set it to do that on sleep and wake up before powering before showing the login screen or when switching into desktop mode just a helpful hint let's talk about uh SD cards sometimes you don't want to open up your steam deck in order to adjust storage which is why it's awesome that valve included an SD card reader in the steam deck and when you are purchasing an SD card uh it's important to note that the maximum right read and WR speeds of anything using the SD card on the steam deck is going to be 104 megabytes per second now you can obviously buy faster more expensive cards than that but they're not going to actually be faster and pretty much all testing has shown that whether or not you're running a game off the SD card or off of the internal storage it really doesn't matter outside of load time so my recommendation is that when you're spending money on an SD card for the steam deck try and find one that has a maximum uh throughput that's at least 104 megabytes per second and then try and stick to about that speed and increase capacity as much as you can afford I'll leave a link to a bunch of different SD cards down below so that you can pick up ones that I know work well with the steam deck and since we're talking about SD cards let's talk about where do you install your games and how do you make that decision well for me generally what I do are the games that I'm playing the most often right now they go on the SSD just because it's faster and the games that I only play from time to time end up on the SD card so sometimes I'm not paying close enough attention when I'm installing a game game and I install it on the wrong Drive how do you move it from one drive to another it's actually really easy come to the steam button head down to settings under settings you're going to scroll down until you see storage which is right here and here you can see all of the games that are installed on my internal drive and all of the games that are installed on my SD card and if I've got a game that I installed on we'll say my SD card then I want to move over to my SSD that's actually really easy to do so for instance I want to move Chrono Trigger over I can either go uninstall or move content I'm going to hit move content it's going to ask me do you want to move it to your internal drive since that's the only other option and I say yes move and it's going to take a minute to move the content over but then when it's done my game will be on the SSD instead of on the SD card which I think is awesome that you can do that without uninstalling and reinstalling by the way I did say earlier I was going to show you about my keyboards if you press the steam button on your steam deck and you come down here to the settings tab and then go down until you see keyboard you can see that you have a bunch of different keyboards over here you can visit the point shop when you bought your steam deck you got a lot of points and you can spend those points on different customized keyboards if you want it doesn't actually cost you anything um I bought a bunch of them from the point shop and you can click on this and change it to whatever you want uh this one right here it comes with it came with the um the more expensive version of the LCD deck the OLED one uh which is right here uh where is it OLED that's this one that looks like kind of red and looks really really awesome but you have a bunch of other options like night shift which looks like that and you if you go into the point shop you've got a bunch of different keyboards that you can buy like that's 5,000 points and I have I've got 201,000 points right now so I can buy one of these uh quite easily I already have totally tubular so I will buy this green one it's called digital if I click on that I'm going to say yes I want it 5,000 points equip now and now I have equipped that keyboard and that actually looks really cool on there um there's other things that are also available on the point shop that you can find under the customization menu right here so I'm going to head down to customization and you can see I can shuffle my startup movie I can use my startup movie as a wake movie and currently my startup movie is the steam deck default but if I want I can switch to another one so I just installed the paddles uh uh movie from the point shop and I'm going to set that as my current one and I'm going to set that as a wake movie and I'm going to turn off my steam deck and now when I wake it up it's going to have that little animation instead of the default animation which is really cool I love that now one last thing that I want to say is if there's a tip that I missed that you think is really really important because I obviously couldn't hit them all in this video let me know in the comment section down below that like button and I will be sure to include it in a future tips and tricks video from the nerd Nest I'm Bill stay rat everybody and uh watch this video right over here bye-bye

Channel: NerdNest

Views: 46,325

Keywords: Nerd Nest, nerdnest, the nerd nest, Steam Deck, Steam Deck tips, Steam Deck news

Id: DVmhIxmHCyo

Length: 48min 39sec (2919 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2024