This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/steamdeck by /u/MythicSuns on 2025-11-07 01:04:11+00:00.

When you’re playing a game on the Steamdeck in gaming mode there’s a performance menu you can bring up by pressing the physical 3 dot button on the right and selecting the performance tab (the one with the lightning bolt). Now, for anyone who hasn’t messed with gaming PC settings before this can feel like a bit of a learning curve but in truth it doesn’t take long to get the hang of them. I’ll start from the top of the menu:

• “Performance Overlay Level” enables an overlay on the top or top left of the screen that displays detailed information about the games performance and how much CPU, GPU and battery power it’s using. This thing is a major boon for fine tuning the performance as it’ll give you numbers that you can work with.
• “use per-game profile” this one is explained in the mini-guide just above the setting but basically this allows you to decide if the settings you apply will be applied to all apps and games on the Steamdeck or just the one that you have open.
• “Refresh Rate” sets the maximum refresh rate of the Steamdeck monitor or external display. On an OLED Steamdeck the maximum is 90hz whilst the LCD Steamdeck gets 60hz. This setting will be replaced with a Frame Rate limit if the “Disable Frame Limit” switch immediately below it is set to off.
• “Allow Tearing” is honestly a setting I’ve never really needed to play around with but it’s essentially a compromise setting. When switched on the Steamdeck will try to improve a game’s performance at the cost of allowing screen tearing to occur. Ideally you never want to deal with screen tearing so this setting is basically a last resort.
• “Half Rate Shading” basically decreases the quality of textures to improve frame rate.
• “TDP Limit” sets the maximum amount of battery power the Steamdeck can provide for a game. I personally recommend using this on a per-game basis as some games require more power than others. If you want to know how much power your game uses then set the Performance Overlay Level to either 2 or 4, play your game for a while and make a mental note of the maximum wattage which will be displayed next to the battery percentage. If the number goes above 15w then don’t use TDP limit. If it goes below 15w then set the limit to 1w higher than the maximum wattage (for example: if a game requires 10w of power then set the limit to 11w, that way if the game suddenly requires a bit more than the maximum wattage you’ve at least left it a bit more room to work with whilst still saving power).
• “Manual GPU Clock” sets how much power the GPU provides for a game. For fairly obvious reasons I also recommend using this on a per-game basis. This setting has a tendency to be misunderstood as functioning just like the TDP Limit but there is one key difference, it’s not a limiter; as the name suggests it literally lets you choose how much GPU power is being used by a fixed amount rather than letting the Steamdeck automatically make adjustments. That being said the performance overlay can still be used to choose the right setting. With the overlay level set to either 3 or 4 you can see how many Mhz of GPU power is being used as you play the game. However, unlike with the TDP Limit your best bet is to find the most graphically intensive moments in a game and then make a mental note of how high the number gets. If the maximum GPU goes above 1600mhz you should leave the setting turned off as that’s the maximum you can manually set. If it’s below 1600Mhz then set the limit to 100Mhz higher than the maximum. The main elephant in the room with this approach is that any games that have some form of linear progression (like the Crash Bandicoot games) might require you to play the game for many hours before you can gauge how much GPU you’ll need, and naturally some games might be a lot more unpredictable (ask any No Man’s Sky player who has ever had their game crash because of an overly complex base) in which case the best bet is to look up the maximum GPU online or ask a friend who might know off-hand. Essentially this setting is another power saver and I personally recommend using it on less intensive games.
• “Scaling Mode” sets how the Steamdeck will adjust any game with an aspect ratio lower than 16:10. By default it’s set to automatic. I’ve never had any negative experiences with just fiddling around with this setting to see what works but just be aware that some emulators like PCSX2 might vary the aspect ratio whenever a game shows a cutscene.
• “Scaling Filter” is basically the Steamdeck’s built-in upscaler. Again, I’ve had no negative experiences with just fiddling around with this setting. If you set it to “sharp” an additional switch will show up that lets you set the sharpness.
• “Show Perf Overlay In Steam” is fairly self explanatory. It’ll basically display the performance overlay outside of the game you’re playing.

Sidenote: if you’re running two or more applications at once then be aware that making manual performance setting adjustments can complicate matters if you’re hot swapping between apps because the Steamdeck has to make sudden adjustments. In those instances the safest bet is to just let the Steamdeck handle things. Another rule of thumb is to not have multiple applications running whilst the Steamdeck is on battery power simply because it’ll drain the battery quickly. In fact I’d extend that rule to any battery powered PC.