Random reboots = RMA Hardware problems my friend

Proton GE (glorious eggroll) really should only be used when regular proton fails. It’s a heavier layer than normal proton. In fact even when proton 8 fails, you should try expirmental first before GE. The only thing I use it for are the additional video codecs to get things like resident evil zero cut screens to work. If you aren’t using the additional functionality of GE, you aren’t gaining anything.

Here is a list of everything proton GE does that normal proton does not:

Additional media foundation patches for better video playback support

AMD FSR patches added directly to fullscreen hack that can be toggled with WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1

FSR Fake resolution patch details here

Nvidia CUDA support for PhysX and NVAPI

Raw input mouse support

‘protonfixes’ system – this is an automated system that applies per-game fixes (such as winetricks, envvars, EAC workarounds, overrides, etc).

Various upstream WINE patches backported

Various wine-staging patches applied as they become needed

TL;DR: if your game is working, just play! If not, try expirmental, then GE if still not working. Don’t use GE just because (more overhead).

Not necessarily. If you force your GPU clock to 200 mhz, do you ever get frame rate dips as low as those settings produce? If not, I think it’s safe to assume you GPU isn’t actually operating at that clock speed. Also I found this post from a YEAR ago that is talking about issue number 1 and how manual settings must be used to achieve the best frame rates. I am very confident these are two separate issues.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/s/3BOuWPyzeM

Set a manual GPU frequency via the QAM (quick access menu->power->Manual GPU clock)

I think there are two bugs here we are associating together in error.

1. Steam OS fails to properly balance power between the GPU and CPU, when the GPU is left to auto clock. Some games are effected by this more than others. This issue seemed to me to exist in 3.4 as well.
2. New to 3.5. Now when the GPU is clocked at or below 1040, instead of reporting the right frequency. SOMETIMES, it reports in intervals of 200 and 1040 instead.

These are my observations on my deck. I may be off base but I think I’m at least close here.