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Steam Deck update gets a small battery life boost with the Frame Limiter
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Okay, but unless you are actively playing a game on a shoestring power budget with a wired controller this isn't even conceptually applicable. And the reason your Linux laptop is power hungry is almost definitely not that it's spending too much power making your controller responsive.
I'd argue the Deck doesn't even fix that particularly well. People keep praising its suspend functionality compared to other devices, but the truth is it isn't very power efficient on sleep. It won't turn on in your bag for mysterious reasons only known to Intel and Windows, but it also won't wake up from a month in sleep with an untouched battery the way a Switch does.
Oh, you refer only to this specific patch. I'm not 100% sure about this patch, but there are other kinds of polling rates, including a global kernel polling rate which greatly affects performance, and tweaking it might perhaps save battery life. And I just mean in general it appears Valve invests a lot of time into mobile power efficiency and I wonder if some makes it upstream.
Well... yeah, this is a thread about this patch. And the change in question is listed under "Steam Input", so I have to assume it's the polling rate of the built-in controller.
I'm not sure if that change is built into Steam Input on the standalone Linux version of Steam, but it's almost certainly not the issue your laptop has with battery life, even when gaming.
Duh, I missed that it was under Steam Input. Yeah, most likely that's just controller polling. Amazing that somehow saves 6% battery.
I think it's a bit of a best case scenario, where they're using a very old game that will run with the lowest allowed 5W TDP with room to spare when locked to 30fps. At that point running the game probably burns so little power you can notice optimizations to stuff like wifi or the controllers. I bet the screen burns more power than the APU in that scenario.
If you're going full blast on a modern game at 30 the power save in percentage is probably trivial, so this seems like a weird combination of factors. But hey, it's a handheld, so every bit helps. Like I said above I just don't know if you'd feel the latency difference in some games where the controller handling is not tied to the display framerate, but I don't know how many PC ports there are where that'd be a thing.