The Steam Deck Battery Can Drain Quickly With The Wrong Settings

With the Steam Deck’s release coming up at the end of February, testers have their hands on the device and are revealing more about how it’ll play. One tidbit coming out from a number of YouTubers testing the Steam Deck is that the handheld device’s battery life will be heavily reliant on what settings are used to play, as reported by PC Gamer.

Officially, Valve has said that the Steam Deck will provide 2-8 hours of batttery, depending on the game and settings being used. Tests from YouTubers Gamers Nexus and The Phawx have shown this range to be generally accurate, though both managed to run the battery down in less than two hours, and neither managed to reach the 8-hour upper limit.

In a battery strain test, Gamers Nexus managed to run the battery down in 87 minutes by running Devil May Cry 5 with an uncapped framerate and Vsync disabled. With a 60fps framerate cap and Vsync enabled, DMC5 lasted around 2 hours instead, scraping the lower end of the Steam Deck’s official battery life.