Steam Deck Throttling, Frame Rate Drops to 1

[naftulikay]

I have a Steam Deck which is fully up-to-date and I've been experiencing this problem for quite some time now.

WHAT THE PROBLEM LOOKS LIKE

What happens is that the framerate drops to 1, the entire device locks up, slows down, and becomes mostly unusable. The internal fan turns off, which is why I think it's some sort of thermal throttling.

Restarting the device breaks the install, and it won't ever be able to boot successfully again. The Steam Deck logo is shown, and it hangs for a long time until it either displays a black screen or a Linux TTY login screen. Using a keyboard does not allow me to enter a username/password. It can never boot again, and will eventually after a certain number of failed boots, it presumably does a factory reset and erases all data on the device, forcing me to log in again and download all games again.

WHEN THE PROBLEM OCCURS

The problem only occurs when not plugged-in to AC power, it only occurs when on battery power.

The problem originally seemed to occur when the battery percentage dipped below a certain level, and seemed to be either thermal or power/battery-based throttling to conserve battery life. What I have learned since then is that it can even happen when battery life is >75%. The problem has occured for me in a variety of games including Jedi: Fallen Order, Doom Eternal, and I think Cyberpunk.

Since I'm an engineer, it seems that this is a combination of hardware and kernel software: the kernel probably makes some decision as to whether to enter a hardware state where battery life is conserved. The kernel never seems to make a decision to exit this mode, or there is a hardware issue or kernel bug where it cannot successfully exit this state. It must be a hardware issue, because it persists across boots and as noted above, is not recoverable with normal boots.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

I have contacted Steam Support and they recommended a few things:

1. make sure it's up to date (it is)
2. make sure that nothing is connected to it like keyboard/mouse/external devices (nothing is connected to it)
3. battery/shipping mode state in the BIOS/UEFI (this does actually work but you have to do it in a very particular way)
4. reflash the image and reinstall the OS (I haven't done this yet)

I don't see a way to actually report things like kernel logs from the device while it is online, and I think that would be very important to do. I might enter desktop mode next time it happens and extract dmesg/journald logs to include with future bug reports.

To do the battery mode/shipping mode fix, you must shut down the device, hold the Volume Up button and press the power button to start the device into BIOS/UEFI. Once you're in it, you'll need to navigate to "Setup Utility," then to the "Power" menu on the left, and then activate the "Battery Storage Mode" option.

While you're doing this, make sure the device is NOT PLUGGED IN TO AC POWER, and make sure it has a reasonable amount of battery. I don't know what reasonable means, there wasn't any guidance from them on this, but I have done this while the device was fully charged. When I have tried this with it plugged in to AC, the issue has not been able to be solved.

This will power off the device and enter what seems to be a deep sleep mode for when the device is shipping.

Next, WAIT 10 MINUTES. When I haven't waited the 10 minutes, this has not fixed the issue, you need to wait. You may be able to wait less than 10 minutes, I have no idea how this works, I've used 10 minutes but you might not have to wait this long. Make sure that it is not plugged in to AC power when you enter this state. Don't plug it in until the 10 minutes are done.

Finally, plug in the device to the included AC adapter, and power it on. This has, in fact, worked for me and avoids many hours of rebooting the device and forcing a reinstall, signing in, downloading all games again.

STEAM DECK DEVS

If there is a way for me to contribute logs back to you when this issue occurs, I am happy to do so. I haven't re-flashed the device, I don't know what that would do that system updates won't do. If it is necessary that I re-flash the device, I can do so but naturally I'd like to avoid that if necessary, I don't want to reinstall the device again and download hundreds of gigabytes of games again.

Next time this occurs, I will try to gather logs from the kernel to see what's going wrong and will hopefully be able to include them at some point in time and try to isolate the bug. I'm not sure if there is a built-in bug reporter to the device that will collect this automatically, when I go to report bug, it simply takes me to this forum.

I hope that this helps someone else who is going through this, and I hope we'll be able to see a fix to this soon. For what it's worth, I have the Steam Deck 512 edition, maybe this is unique to that device, but I'm not sure why this would be the case.

[naftulikay]

Also this may not come across clearly enough in the original post, but this problem only occurs when not plugged in, only occurs on battery power mode. I have never observed this problem to occur when plugged in to AC. The battery level also doesn't appear to matter, as this has happened at 25/30/75% battery.

[Packo Jacko]

Hello, I think the same thing is happening to me but with my SteamDeck just released a week ago and with the updated OS.
Do you know any solution?

[lasagna]

I have observed the throttling issue on death stranding directors cut. It seems like its gotten worse on my deck over time, but also the game populates more things in the game world over time so perhaps its that too.

I have also observed the throttling issue in death stranding on AC power, though its much less likely to happen. Playing on battery seems to make it much more likely to happen.

[DNY]

Any word if this still a Problem? I had this occur a couple of weeks ago the last time, before the last stable update. Since then, it did not happen for me. The last game was Batman Arkham Knight, so I'm running the game at the moment, I'm at 22 percent Battery and it has not throttled yet. I'm also running the old fan profile, as i got a silent fan.

Maybe the last stable update fixed this issue for good and we just don't know about it?

[glebkorniyenko]

Is it possible that the game running somehow requires more charge than the deck has left (calculated from current usage) and the charge left simply is not enough so it refuses to run? I am currently playing the last of us and it keeps mostly 30 fps, but 2 times in a row now it would start stuttering and slows down to 1-2 fps as soon as I get notification that 10% battery left, then I immediately quit the game because after it locks up only hard reset works. I've also seen this with mafia definitive edition. After quitting the game the device runs normally, haven't tried plugging ac while the game is running yet though

[Frizan]

I've seen this issue twice now, currently dealing with the second occurrence. Was playing a demanding game (Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis) on battery when it dropped to around 8% and began throttling. Trying the shipping battery setting now, thanks for the detailed usage notes.

Edit: The battery storage mode has worked for now, will report if I see the issue again.

Edit2: Battery storage mode worked again, and again was triggered by low battery

[Kolo]

Thanks for the helpful post! Seems like I've encountered this bug. Don't know what exactly happened and caused the problem, but one night I sent the Deck into sleep mode. Next morning, I awake the Deck. Game I playing was still running, but didn't respond. After few seconds, Deck turned himself off. After restart, Deck started hanging on the boot stage, often leading into the black screen. Problem fixed itself after entering & exiting the battery storage mode.

[Skars]

Option 3, battery/shipping mode is always the case for me. Whenever my Deck gets to a minimum battery level, the performance drops, and I can only fix it with this method.

[teal-dog]

Same here, I've seen this happening with the games Jusant and Astroneer. After resetting it gets stuck on the Steam logo. Setting the Battery Storage mode as described above fixed the issue

[Pedrogddr]

Option 3 worked for me for a short while. I had this issue with Mass Effect Legendary Edition (Mass Effect 3 only).

It only started to show this problem after I got an SD Card (256 GB). That game, however, is not on the SD card. It remains in the Steam Deck's storage.

The problem does seem to happen only while on Battery Mode. If it's plugged in, at the very least is inconvenient. On battery mode is unplayable most of the times.

The problem still persists, but it's not as bad. I've yet to see this in other games.