Following the Steam Deck launch, Valve has been updating the system software to feel a lot more polished on a regular basis. If you missed our review, see what Jared thought of it at launch here. I’ve been including the Steam Deck in my iOS and Switch reviews here as another platform to compare ports with, and it has been interesting to see how some games scale across all the handhelds and modern mobile devices. If you recently got a Steam Deck, you should read my list of best games to play on it and the must-have accessories for it. One aspect of the Steam Deck that has annoyed me the most, is how the system software still feels unstable in some ways. This relates to buggy notifications, internet-related issues, and with how some of the best features don’t seem implemented as well. The good thing is, Valve’s regular updates have been addressing a lot of these with today’s update delivering on two fronts. The first is one of my most wanted features, per-game performance profiles. Check out how this looks in the overlay in the cropped screenshot below:
The reason I wanted this so much, is that I’ve been limiting Elden Ring to 30fps while leaving the other games capped to 60fps. Elden Ring is better off at 30fps (or 40fps soon), and until today’s update, you had to manually change this back to 60fps. The recent Chrono Cross enhanced release ends up running in slow motion with this 30fps cap. Features like per-game performance profile make it so you can spend a few minutes tweaking each game’s power consumption and performance through the Steam Deck’s own settings without having to worry about how other games will be affected. The next step is surely letting users upload these profiles so that others can download them like the controller profiles. Valve’s other highlight in this update for me is finally fixing the annoying inventory notification for when you’ve gotten a Steam trading card from playing a game. Check out the full update patch notes here. I’m looking forward to the 40hz refresh rate limiting update to hit soon as well. This video from The Phawx is a great showcase of why it is important for a device like this. What do you think of your Steam Deck if you’ve managed getting one so far?
