Steam Deck’s battery life could get a boost thanks to Valve’s VRS enhancements
One of the most important specifications that determines the success of any portable gaming device is battery life, and the Steam Deck is no exception. Valve estimates that users can expect 2-8 hours of gameplay on its handheld gaming PC, but the company appears to be working on driver-level enhancements that could help push the process further.
According to a recent merge request on GitLab, Valve engineers appear to be working on improvements to the Vulkan Radeon driver, as discovered by Phoronix and explained very helpfully. More specifically, to better control the behavior of VRS (Variable Rate Shading) at the driver level to improve power savings.
If you’re not familiar with VRS, it lets you render the shading quality of specific parts of the frame at different quality levels. This is useful in all video games, especially racing games like Dirt 5. For example, it allows car models to maintain the highest possible shading quality, while fast-moving peripheral elements such as environments have lower shading rates, freeing up performance and reducing power consumption.
It’s unclear how Valve plans to change the behavior of the VRS, but Phoronix suggests the company may adjust the feature depending on whether the Steam Deck is running on AC power or with its 40Whr battery turned off. We’ll just have to wait and see if we notice any difference when we start using the device in February.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot to read and get excited about when it comes to the Steam deck, like Half-Life 2 getting a new UI to make it more suitable for portable powerhouses. Additionally, the company announced a new dynamic cloud sync feature that will help make moving between Steam devices easier.
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