PERFORMANCE OVERLAY
Knowing how to enable the performance overlay on the Steam Deck helps you get more from it immediately. Astonishingly, given it’s a handheld, the Steam Deck has all of the functionality of the desktop version of Valve’s game launcher and marketplace. That means you can enable the performance overlay to see a game’s frame rate. This is important if you want to see how well a game performs at different graphical settings. The Steam Deck also provides additional metrics that could be useful, and they can all help you figure out whether you’ve got the flexibility to tweak settings to maximise performance or battery life.
Turning on the performance overlay is easier on Steam Deck than on the desktop version. That’s because you can easily bring it up by pressing the Quick Access Menu (QAM) button. Within the Performance section, you’ll see a slider with four levels. Moving to a higher level shows more performance metrics. This neat feature does an excellent job of displaying how well (or poorly) a game runs on Steam Deck.
Click the QAM button, which is located on the right-hand side of the screen and beneath the right touchpad. Within the QAM, you’ll see five different tabs. Scroll down to the battery icon, which represents the Performance tab, and press A to enter this menu. You’ll find the performance overlay level beneath the battery life counter. Head to Performance Overlay Level and press A to enter this submenu.
You’ll see four performance overlay levels along a slider. Move the slider right or left to select different levels. The first shows the current frames per second. Higher levels display things such as GPU and CPU performance percentages, fan speed and more.
Click on Advanced View to see a list of additional settings. You can set frame rate limit, refresh rate, thermal power (TDP) limit, manual GPU clock control and more. It can get pretty granular, but this is one of Steam Deck’s main selling points – it’s extremely customisable. Click the B button a couple of times to hide the QAM screen to exit. To disable metrics, just follow the previous steps.