Settings On Your Steam Deck That Are Ruining Your Experience – SlashGear

A screen’s refresh rate determines how often the screen refreshes itself within a second to display the next image. It is expressed in hertz (Hz). The higher the refresh rate, the smoother the screen is. A higher refresh rate also reduces screen tearing and stutter. The Steam Deck has a 60Hz screen, which is why going above 60 FPS in games does not make any visible difference since the screen is not able to refresh as fast. Therefore, it makes sense to sync your FPS and refresh rate for the best results.

A higher FPS count does reduce input lag, but it is almost negligible if your refresh rate cannot keep up with it. Higher frames should only be used for competitive gaming since lower input lag is a must-have in that case. Just like frames per second, a screen’s refresh rate also draws battery life. It is adjustable through Performance settings right below the Framerate Limit option. We recommend matching your hertz with your custom FPS limits to maintain battery life.

All of these settings should be saved individually through the per-game profile feature, so you will only have to do this once.

To check if your settings are actually being applied, you can turn on Performance Overlay at different levels to see your FPS, hardware temperature, and a lot more. Higher settings will even let you see the CPU clock speed, VRAM usage, etc.