The latest Steam Deck update is now available to download, providing you’ve been lucky enough to acquire the handheld gaming PC, of course. This patch introduces the usual bug fixes and improvements, but we’re most excited about a new feature that promises to make Valve’s device more convenient to use: per-game performance profiles.
In the last Steam Deck update or two, Valve gave players the ability to change the frame rate limit of games, TDP limit, and the refresh rate of the device itself on a system-wide level. While these were welcome features, it quickly became tedious reconfiguring these settings to accommodate the performance footprint of a game each and every time you loaded one up.
That all changes today with the arrival of per-game performance profiles. When enabled, the Steam Deck will remember how you’ve configured the settings in the system’s performance menu for each game, allowing you to spend less time tinkering and more time playing. If at any point you’re not happy with how you’ve set things up, Valve has also implemented a means of resetting everything back to their default state.
You can check out in-game performance profiles in action in Gaming On Linux‘s video below:
While it isn’t yet possible to run SteamOS and Windows 11 on a Steam Deck, one user managed to get a retro version of Apple MacOS on the portable powerhouse.