Maybe it’s been discussed before, but I’ve never seen related topics. So here I go.
I’ve been playing around with the settings on my Steam Deck and observe something interesting about the GPU’s performance. I noticed that when the GPU clock speed exceeds 1200 MHz, it seems to become significantly less efficient.
From what I’ve observed:
- The lower the clock speed, the more efficient (in terms of fps per watt) it is. However, the improvement became really negligible below 800~1000 MHz.
- 1200 MHz seems to be the big turning point of efficiency. Pushing it to 1600 MHz, the power consumption nearly doubles, but the performance boost is often less than 20%.
So in my opinion, keeping the GPU under 1200 MHz might be the best way to play on the go.
This also has the added benefit of giving the CPU more headroom, which should help lessen stuttering caused by sudden CPU spike, and make the overall experience smoother.
Just my two cents. What do you guys think?
That’s generally how clock speeds for cpus and gpus work…
Your observations are correct. From 10w to 15w TDP deck usually gains like 15% performance for 50% more consumption.