Here’s the actual guide and tweaks that’s being benchmarked by Phoronix.
Just a heads up to anyone who’s going to try these, forcing the performance governor all the time will crank your power consumption way up. The rest of the tweaks here should be relatively battery friendly.
Question for deck owners: does the steam deck not have any way to change platform profile modes? Most of the Linux desktops have rolled in UI features to make platform profile config pretty easy to switch between “Balanced”, “Performance” and “Power Save” modes. If that’s available you’ll see better power efficiency by leaving the CPU governor alone and using the Performance platform profile.
i know that you can change the power profile in KDE, idk on the original steam deck ui
It’s not built in afaik, but with Power Tools you can change the governor on the fly
Ooh thanks! I wanna try it out.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A Phoronix reader recently published a guide that at its heart is a set of commands aimed at boosting the performance of SteamOS on the AMD APU powered Steam Deck.
Here are some benchmarks showing the performance impact from these changes on the SteamOS 3.5 Preview release.
The set of changes include setting the Steam Deck’s Van Gogh APU to the performance governor, adjusting the MGLRU settings, adjusting the memlock values, setting the I/O scheduler to Kyber, silencing the watchdog timer, and avoiding extra operations on file access times.
See this blog post for all the details and instructions.
Following my recent SteamOS 3.4 vs. SteamOS 3.5 Preview benchmarks, I repeated the SteamOS 3.5 Preview run while applying these optimizations as recommended.
No other changes were made to the Steam Deck besides making the noted changes and then repeating the benchmarks.
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Another article that may be of interest
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/modded-steam-deck-so-much-better/
Of the modding, I’ve only done the SSD upgrade and software portions. Could not recommend upgrading the SSD more, it is such a nice QOL change since you no longer have to play musical games nearly as much, and still maintain the advantages of the read/write. I have a 1tb SD card as well. Between those two, I have as much storage as I would reasonably want in a portable device. Especially as newer titles suck out 100gb a pop, having the ability to play a handful or more of them without sacrificing others is really nice.
On the software side, EmuDeck or retrodeck, decky loader and a dual boot into windows is also super nice.
It’s great that at least one company decided to start making 2TB SSDs that will fit!
Exactly, and being accessible via Amazon is nice. I got my 2tb via Ali Express back in January, but didn’t actually receive it til mid February due to Chinese new year. Was well worth the wait and effort though. Having it via Amazon makes it so the wait isn’t as painful.
It is a bit of a project, as you’ll have not only the physical installation, but the OS installation too. So I’d recommend a nice 2-3 hour time window for those considering it and maybe doing some pre-work before getting it, such as getting a USB with the SteamOS recovery available, make sure you have an adapter to fit it (if it’s a usb a stick) and backing up any games to another media device for a more seamless transition.
And at least getting that replacement backplate for better airflow, to do both at the same time is probably ideal.
how does this compare to CryoByte33’s tool?
