Depending on what you're playing, Valve's new Steam Deck battery can last as long as eight hours or as little as two. More graphically demanding games require more power to drive the hardware that enables them, with SteamOS doing a pretty decent job of load-balancing everything dynamically in the background. If you are looking for a few other settings you can tinker with to get the best out of your Steam Deck's battery life, we've got a few hints.

Limit your framerate

The Steam Deck's 1200x800 display is beautiful and bright, featuring a native 60Hz refresh rate that benefits less graphically intensive games. But running at a higher refresh rate requires more power for both the display and the APU spitting out each frame. Thankfully, SteamOS features a system-level 30fps frame rate cap in its quick settings menu, letting you bypass any similar settings in games that might not work as well.

It's a useful feature that can be toggled on at any time, and you'll likely see a significant uptick in your expected battery life as a result. This setting alone can claw back an hour or two when playing some smaller games like Spelunky 2 or Celeste, and a little less with more demanding games like God of War (where just running at 30fps is the target anyway).