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My kingdom for a gaming handheld with better battery life. Well, other than the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and Asus ROG Ally X. I mean one I actually own, like my Steam Deck. But today I rejoice, for Valve’s latest Beta client update for the Deck is said to improve battery life.
When the Steam Frame Limiter is active. And, err, by six whole percent. In low-powered games.
Look, I know it’s not a lot. But when it comes to battery life every little bit counts, as anyone will attest if they’ve sat in an airport lounge trying to do a bit of handheld PC gaming with selfish MacBook users taking up all the available charging sockets.
This is a prime moment to enable the frame rate limiter, as it brings down power usage in its own right by taking some of the stress and strain off of the ageing Zen 2-based APU inside.
And an extra six percent? That might be the difference between reaching Terra Tunnel in a Spelunky 2 run or wondering for the rest of your flight what might have been.
Valve says it’s achieved this by reducing the polling rate when the frame limiter is active, and the “up to 6%” claim is based on running something undemanding at low frame rates, like Half-Life 2 at 30 fps. It’s a squeak, a tad, a squidge more power out of your gaming handheld on the move, no doubt, but still worth celebrating.
Slightly. Perhaps not with a whole cake and balloons fiasco, but more with a polite nod and a reassuring slap on the back.
Still, battery tech doesn’t look to be making any major leaps and bounds in the near future (despite what many claim) and it’ll still likely be a while before we see a Steam Deck 2 with hopefully a bigger battery and a more efficient APU, so in the meantime I’ll take what I can get.
Six percent? Sold. Now where did I leave my portable battery pack?
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Kurt Indovina
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