9 Steam Deck tricks and tips you need to know about – Digital Trends

The Steam Deck is absolutely stuffed with features, settings, and configuration options, and you might not know about all of them. Ive pulled together nine Steam Deck tricks and tips that you can use to get around the machine faster, save battery life, and make the most of of Valves handheld gaming PC.

TheSteambutton will quickly become your best friend with the Steam Deck, but it does more than open your menu. Hold it down for a couple of seconds longer to pull up a list of Steam Deck shortcuts that show you how to take a screenshot, force quit a game, and more.

Youll find the full list of shortcuts by holding down theSteambutton, but here they are for quick reference:

You have access to four back buttons on the Steam Deck, but they dont do anything by default. You can customize your controls in any game by launching it and pressing theSteambutton. Scroll to the right and selectControllersettings to rebind any of the buttons on the Deck, browse community layouts, and create your own layouts. Valve even includes several controller templates to get you started, regardless of if a game supports controllers or not. You cant do that on a Nintendo Switch.

The Steam Deck automatically sorts your library and provides a Great on Deck category thats a little misleading. These are all of the Deck Verified games in your library, which means theyve been tested by Valve and provide a seamless experience when playing on Deck. That doesnt mean the rest of your Steam library is out, though.

Swap over to your full library and press theXbutton to selectFilter by Verified and playable.Countless titles work perfectly well on Steam Deck but dont have full verification due to a pregame launcher or a minor configuration issue. Although you should explore your full library, I recommend starting with the best Deck Verified games first.

The default Steam Deck keyboard theme is boring. Head to theSettingsmenu and selectKeyboardto change it. Youll have a few themes by default, plus an extra if you have a 512GB model, and Valve sells more themes in the Steam points shop. There arent a ton of options now, but I expect well see a lot more keyboard themes in the future.

The Steam Deck now supports half-rate shading, which can massively improve your battery life. Half-rate shading basically cuts the resolution of pixel shaders in half. Although half-rate shading is available in every game, I recommend using in pixel art games in particular.

If youre a big fan of platformer games and indie titles like me, half-rate shading will save you a ton of battery life (hours, in many cases). The lower resolution doesnt matter in pixel art games, but be careful with half-rate shading in more graphically complex games it can really hurt image quality.

You can use AMDs FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) with any game on Steam Deck, but enabling it is a little confusing. FSR improves performance and saves battery by upscaling a game from a lower resolution. To turn it on, lower your resolution in any game and open theQuick settings menu. Scroll down toPerformanceand select FSRunder theScaling Filtersection.

There are a ton of other options here, too make sure to read our guide on how to check your frame rate on Steam Deck to see what some of them do.

You can use Xbox Game Pass on the Steam Deck, at least a little bit. You can only stream Game Pass titles through Microsoft Edge, which you need to access the Steam Deck desktop for. To get there, press theSteambutton, select Power,and chooseSwitch to Desktop.

Once youve gotten Edge working and youre signed into your Game Pass account, make sure to check out our roundup of the best games on Xbox Game Pass to know what to play first.

Battery life is a big issue, so if you cant pick up a power bank for Steam Deck, youll have to find other ways to save power. Open theQuick settingsmenu andscroll down toPerformanceto limit your graphics power (listed asThermal power TDP). Turning the power down can save you massive battery life while traveling (though, the TSA might still make fun on your Steam Deck at the airport).

Open up a game likeCivilization VI,and youll quickly see the problem with the size of the Steam Decks screen. Thankfully, you can use the Magnifier to zoom in on areas that may be hard to read. To use it, hold downSteamandL1and use the right joystick to select the area of the screen you want to zoom in on. Let go and itll stay there. You can turn off the Magnifier by using the same Steam+L1shortcut.

Original post:
9 Steam Deck tricks and tips you need to know about - Digital Trends