by In this quick guide, we will show you how to view your FPS on the Steam Deck.
FPS stands for Frames Per Second and is a measure of the number of frames your Steam Deck is rendering every second. This measurement can help you tell how well a game performs on your device.
Luckily, viewing the FPS on the Steam Deck is a straightforward process, thanks to the inbuilt performance overlay.
This performance overlay is a neat thing to be included within the gaming overlay, as you can quickly get an idea of how a game performs on your Steam Deck. This tool can even show more than just the FPS, such as your RAM, CPU, and GPU usage.
By the end of the following section, you will know how to enable this performance overlay on your Steam Deck to view your current FPS.
Viewing the FPS on a Steam Deck
The Steam Deck’s operating system has a simple way of viewing your FPS no matter what game you are playing. Of course, for this to work smoothly, you must ensure your Deck is in gaming mode and not desktop mode.
Any game you launch while in gaming mode runs with Steams overlay. This overlay is what gives us the ability to easily bring up the FPS and other performance information on the Steam Deck
1. First, you will want to have the game running that you want to view the FPS of on your Steam Deck.
For this example, we will be playing the game “Cloudpunk“. This is a verified Deck compatible title, so it should run somewhat well on our device.
You will find a lot of more modern games will target an FPS of 30 when running on the Steam Deck.
2. While you have a game running on your Steam Deck, you will want to press the button with the three dots (...) on it. This button is located on the right side of your Deck.
Pressing this button will bring up the quick settings panel and is also where you can enable the option to display the FPS on your Steam Decks screen.
3. With the quick settings panel, you will want to change to the “Performance” tab. This tab is represented by the battery icon in the sidebar.
You can use the D-PAD or trackpads on your Steam Deck to navigate these menus.
4. Once you are on the Performance tab, you can get your Steam Deck to display the FPS by changing the “Performance Overlay Level” from “Off” to “1“.
You can select this option by pressing the “A” button, then adjust the slider using the D-PAD or the left-hand trackpad.
5. After setting the Steam Deck’s performance overlay to “1“, you will see your FPS in the top-right corner of the screen.
If you feel like a game is struggling on your Steam Deck, you can try forcing on FSR. FSR will allow you to run the game at a lower resolution and upscale it to the Decks screen.
6. By using higher values, the performance overlay will show you more than just the Steam Deck’s FPS.
Setting the value to “4“, you can see how the game performs across every core on your Deck, its RAM usage, and even more.
Limiting the FPS on your Steam Deck
A higher FPS doesn’t necessarily mean you will get a great experience on your Steam Deck, especially if that game can’t maintain those frames.
To work around this, the Steam Deck allows you to limit the FPS on your Deck to 15, 30, or 60 FPS.
Using this feature has a couple of benefits. First, it ensures your Steam Deck can spend more time at a frame rate it can consistently achieve. You can also help battery life by not rendering more frames than you need.
1. To limit a game’s framerate on your Steam Deck, you will need to have that game running.
For this example, we will be using the game Cloudpunk. Looking at the top right, you can see that we are getting 53 FPS.
2. Like viewing your FPS, you must bring up the quick settings menu by tapping the three-dot button on your Deck.
With the menu open, you must change to the performance tab. This tab is indicated by the battery icon.
3. With the performance tab open, you will need to ensure that the “Advanced Options” are enabled.
4. After enabling advanced options, you will see numerous more options. Scroll down until you see “Framerate Limit“.
This limit allows you to lock the amount of FPS the Steam Deck will try to render at. For this example, we will adjust this value from 60 to 30 FPS.
5. After adjusting the FPS, you can see the game was immediately dropped from rendering at 53 FPS to a value closer to the framerate limit.
Conclusion
Hopefully, at this point in the guide, you will know how to view the FPS on your Steam Deck.
Viewing the FPS lets you quickly and easily see how a game performs on your device. We have also shown how to get your Steam Deck to limit its FPS.
Please comment below if you have any issues viewing the FPS on your Deck.
If you found this tutorial helpful, be sure to check out our many other Steam Deck guides.
