Battery Life
The battery life of the Steam Deck has received quite a bit of attention in online reviews and comments. The standard listed on Valve’s Steam Deck website is 2-8 hours of gameplay per charge. Our unit takes about 2.5 hours to charge from automatic low battery shutdown to fully charged.
The graphs show our experience playing games from a full charge to the low battery shutdown. We used default performance settings otherwise and a screen brightness of 75%.
The two games were chosen based on their performance draw on the GPU. Half-Life 2 which is an older game that is known for playability across many system configurations and Dying Light 2, a recent release that is graphically much more demanding. We set the framerate limiter at various levels and played the game until the battery ran out.
Dying Light 2 was played on preset “Low” settings using in-game FSR, and Half-Life 2 was played with all settings on “High”. Valve states that reducing the frame rate will prolong the battery life, so we took them up on it.
Dying Light 2 was chosen due to its much more demanding graphics. The game will play for 94 minutes with an unlimited framerate (averaging 42FPS) at 99% GPU utilization. Due to the framerate of 52 maximum in our test settings, the fixed framerate testing was set to 30 FPS. The battery was able to run for 166 minutes. Over an hour increase in time with less (78%) GPU utilization.
One can see by the graphing that Valve indeed has given good advice. Half-Life 2 will play for 114 minutes set on unlimited FPS. The GPU will run at 70% utilization with a framerate of over 240. If we reduce the framerate to a fixed 60FPS (30% utilization) the battery life will increase over 100% to 245 minutes.
Quite honestly, over the course of testing, 4 hours was the best we could achieve on the Steam Deck playing any of the games listed here today.