this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Steam Deck
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Scenes in most games usually have a high variety of complexity, so the way you'd achieve that is through getting a baseline quite a bit higher than your target FPS, and then limit FPS to your target FPS. This way the game won't utilize near 100 % of the GPU most of the time, but peaks in scene complexity won't cause FPS to drop below the set cap.
This is how it works or at least use to work for a lot of games on console. On PC, you almost always have to make the choice yourself (which is a good thing if you ask me).
For many games with a lot of changing scenery I have to target around 45 FPS with graphics settings to even have a chance of achieving somewhat consistent 30 FPS/33.33ms on the Deck.
On the one hand the Deck is heavily underpowered compared to even lower-end PCs. On the other hand tests show that the Z1 Extreme/7840U isn't much faster at these lower wattages (10-15 watts TDP), so there hasn't been a lot of progress yet.
But it's also that many games don't scale so well anymore. I feel like half the settings in many modern games don't affect performance to any noticeable degree, and even fewer settings affect CPU usage. And if there's low settings, the game often looks unrecognizable because these lower setting models, textures and lighting/shadows are simply generated by the engine SDK and rarely given second thoughts.
Tech like nanite rendering does bring a potential of maybe solving that variability. But even before that, LODs, detail render distance limits etc. already allow frame rates to be leveled out, if utilized.
And I would consider 30 and 45 within that "similar" range. I'm not asking the framerate to stay within even 10% of an average at all times. But games are getting a lot worse than that.
A recent game even my desktop has been struggling with is Forbidden West, which I tuned the settings on to achieve 80-100 fps, yet in some locations (larger settlements) it will chug down to 20-30.
Some newer games aren't just losing 33% fps at worst vs best. But more like 70%. At that point you end up having to target 200fps just to never drop below 60, and that's tricky even on high end desktops.