Steam Deck – 40 FPS is the new 60

Would you like to improve your Steam Deck’s battery life, lower your temperatures and still have a great gaming experience? Well this one trick that doctors hate… Ok no seriously the very knowledgeable folks in the comments of my last Steam Deck videos have talked about the “golden 40Hz” enough for me to give it a try and.. Wow. I’m blown away. Let me show you what I mean.

I’ve fired up No Man’s Sky, an incredibly intensive game that the Steam Deck can run mostly fine, but it’s definitely pushing its limits. Now I’m running at 60Hz with a 60FPS cap here, and it’s reasonably smooth. There are some dips to around 50 FPS or so, but it’s pretty smooth overall. It is heating up the SoC though, with the fan kicking on pretty quickly and it’s up into the high 60°c or low 70°c range. We are also seeing about 22W drawn from the battery – that’s about 8W or so from the GPU alone, and another 4W or so from the CPU.

Now I’m going to press the three dots button, and in the battery tab I’m going to drag the refresh rate slider down to the lowest value which is 40 Hz. You’ll notice that also updates the FPS limit to be 40 FPS too. So now back to No Man’s Sky and.. Wow. It does feel a tiny bit more sluggish, but No Man’s Sky kinda feels that way anyway to me. More importantly though, look at the performance overlay! It’s now drawing, what, like 15W? That’s an insane difference! That’s like 40% more power consumption for only a tiny bit more visual smoothness. For a game like No Man’s Sky I honestly don’t mind, the playing experience really isn’t that much different. What is different though is how stable it is at 40 FPS. There are no dips at all, it’s properly locked in here. You might also notice the fan is barely running – the temps have dropped to the mid to low 60°c range, which is absolutely insane for such a little difference in playing experience.

For a bit of a different experience I’m gonna fire up Absolute Rally, a beautiful, fairly low poly game about rally through the years. I’m in free roam here, and still running at 40 Hz and 40 FPS. It’s practically sipping power here at just 12W or so, dipping to just 10W depending on the scene too, which makes for a phenomenal experience. I’d argue the smoothness is definitely missing here though, and considering this isn’t exactly the most demanding game anyway I think I’m gonna turn it back up to 60 Hz.

Man, the difference between 40 and 60 FPS in this is night and day! It’s considerably smoother, and for a game like this that’s a pretty big selling point. What’s more interesting for me is the distinct lack of a difference in the thermals and power consumption. Maybe there’s a 1W difference on average… but you’d struggle to notice a difference. The fan basically never kicks on at high speed when playing this anyway, and now I can see why. It’s just nowhere near a demanding game, which means the power savings don’t really exist between the two modes.

Ok, one last test, this time with GTA V. This is at 60 Hz, and one thing I’m noticing is just how CPU heavy this game is. In most games the GPU is the one drawing the most power, by far, but in this the CPU is drawing an insane 10W just driving around! It peaks at more like 12W which is pretty insane, compared to the GPU practically sipping power at 1.5W or so. The SoC is also sitting at a toasty 80°c pretty constantly, and the fan is running almost full tilt. It does sit at a mostly constant 60 FPS, but you do occasionally get some stutters or dips. Still a pretty great experience, but could be better for sure.

Now I’ve got it running at 40Hz and 40 FPS and.. I can’t believe just how big of a difference this is! I’m not feeling a big difference in the gaming experience at 40 FPS, and yet the SoC is at more like 60°c and the fan has basically turned off! The battery is now only using 15W, which means it has almost doubled the battery life estimate from under an hour to almost an hour and a half with 50% battery! I can’t believe how big of a difference just running at 40 Hz makes, but it really, really does. I mean in some games you are getting almost double your battery life, lower temperatures, less fan noise, and while of course I CAN notice the difference, I’m not actively bothered by it on a portable device like this. I mean I’ve just played Pokemon Sword at 30 FPS for weeks so 40 FPS is a solid improvement.

You might be wondering why adding just 10 FPS more above 30 FPS makes such a noticeable difference, about the same difference as going from 40 to 60 FPS – and the answer is frame times. If you are getting a constant 30 frames per second, that means you see a new frame every 33.3ms. That’s how long there is between new frames. At 60 FPS that’s every 16.7ms, but because frames per second is an averaged measurement, the difference between larger and larger numbers actually gets smaller and smaller. 40 FPS means each frame takes 25ms, which just happens to be right in the middle of 30 and 60. That’s why you perceive the same jump in smoothness between a 10 FPS gap and a 20 FPS gap.

As for why it helps the deck so much, there are a myriad of factors there. Some of it is the power savings from the display itself not having to refresh as often, some if it I’m sure comes from Proton not having to work as hard to convert instructions on the fly, but the majority of it comes from the FPS cap meaning the game doesn’t have to work anywhere near as hard to draw new frames – and do everything each frame requires like new physics calculations. That all adds up to a significant power saving, which obviously means lower thermals and better battery life.