Steam Deck update: the best feature from the Steam Deck – bar none, in my opinion – is when the portable gaming PC enables you to obtain the absolute most out of its AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 40 watt-hour battery. By the final update, you can lower the screen’s refresh rate to improve your effective framerate minimizing latency, and you’ve had the ability to throttle the CPU, GPU, and frame limiter since launch. The issue: even though you determined an excellent combination that gave the battery existence and/or performance you crave, the Steam Deck update wouldn’t save an individual’s settings per game.

You’d need to commit to memory them, and flick the toggles appropriately, any time you switched to a new game. That changes today.

Wednesday’s update now includes per-game performance settings, allowing you to flick just one switch within the Fast Access menu to create a custom performance profile for every one of the games.

Flick them back, and you will be to your global system settings so that you can have both a “generally I love my games running at 30fps” setting but additionally “Elden Ring should run at 40fps having a 40Hz refresh rate” and “Vampire Survivors should run at 10fps and 5 watts because I wish to listen to it for that whole of the vehicle ride” if you want.

It has been probably the most-requested Steam Deck feature forever, and I’m wishing there’s more in the future – since it doesn’t allow you to set multiple profiles (like one profile when you are connected to AC power, and the other for that longest battery existence you can handle), or save and share profiles using the bigger community to ensure that we Power Users might help the less-tweak-happy in our midst obtain games running better.

(Valve already demonstrated to us how effective that may be with community controller profiles – a large reason many ancient games were immediately playable around the Steam Deck update happens because users were asked to upload configurations for that Steam Controller in older days.)

I believe Valve is extremely conscious of this, and today’s update lays the research for that a lot. Because the Steam Deck still may not be ready for everybody who might get a Nintendo Switch, an update after the update has proven Valve is listening carefully and carefully to power user feedback.

Digital Foundry lately did a great take a look at the way the previous update’s adjustable refresh rate and fan curve allow you to have more from the Steam Deck update. I’m embedding a duplicate below for your viewing pleasure.

Read the entire Steam Deck update changelog here. The remainder is mainly bug fixes, though you may also now hold lower the ability button to “stop streaming” a game title, and Valve moved the haptics and rumble toggles from the Fast Access menu. That’s a big change I really disagree with they arrived handy when a mature game (can’t remember which) really was overzealous in using the vibrations.