The Steam Deck has an ‘elective built-in FPS limiter’ for higher battery life

When Valve and IGN revealed final Thursday that the brand new Steam Deck handheld will goal 30Hz gameplay, not everybody was impressed with that low bar — however Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais has taken to Twitter to make clear his unique remark, and reveal a brand new function of the transportable console.

First, he says 30 fps is extra of a minimal bar than anything:

“The ‘30 FPS goal’ refers back to the flooring of what we take into account playable in our efficiency testing; video games we’ve examined and proven have constantly met and exceeded that bar up to now,” he writes.

In different phrases, when Griffais stated in that IGN video interview that “We haven’t actually discovered one thing that we might throw at this machine that it couldn’t deal with,” you shouldn’t take it to imply that each fashionable sport runs at 60 fps. Anticipate much less.

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Valve’s gaming handheld is known as the Steam Deck and it’s transport in December

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Intriguingly, a 30 fps mode might be one thing you possibly can proactively activate to get extra battery life, too. “There may also be an elective built-in FPS limiter to fine-tune perf vs. battery life,” he writes. The corporate’s already stated you possibly can play Portal 2 for as much as six hours at 30fps, in comparison with 4 hours usually.

Will it’s a good 30 fps mode, although? That’s TBD. Within the replies, Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter says Valve confirmed to him that the Steam Deck doesn’t have a variable-refresh-rate (VRR) display, and eludes to the concept V-sync would possibly wind up creating some nasty body pacing points when you attempt to lock video games to 30Hz on the Deck’s display. (Digital Foundry would know; it is coated the problem many instances throughout PC and console. Darkish Souls and Sekiro developer From Software program is infamous for inconsistent frame-pacing, for instance.)

A 30fps setting might be tremendous for demanding video games, however with v-sync energetic please be certain that a brand new body is synchronised with each different display refresh (typical on consoles) to make sure consistency. 30fps capped however delivered inconsistently at 16.7ms/33.3ms/50ms will not be an important expertise

— Digital Foundry (@digitalfoundry) July 25, 2021

Griffais hasn’t replied but. We’ll see!

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