by In this quick guide, we will be showing you how to control the brightness of the Steam Deck’s screen.
If you ever find that the brightness of your Steam Deck’s screen seems too high or too low, you can easily adjust it through the Deck’s interface.
Valve has included most of the options you want to adjust in a quick panel that is very easy to use. You may have already used this panel to enable features such as the Steam Deck’s FPS overlay.
The Deck even has a feature designed to help keep the brightness level just right by adapting it based on the ambient light level.
In the following sections, we will show you how easy it is to control the brightness of your screen and how you can enable or disable the adaptive brightness functionality.
Quickly Adjusting Screen Brightness on the Steam Deck
This section will show you how easy it is to quickly adjust the brightness of the Steam Deck’s screen.
Valve has made adjusting the most important settings on your Deck a really simple and straightforward process. Even better, it can be done easily at any time, including while you are playing a game.
1. The Steam Deck’s screen brightness can be adjusted at any time by opening the quick panel.
You can open this panel by pressing the three dots button (...) on the right side of your device.
2. With the quick panel open, you must change to the quick settings panel by selecting the cog (1.).
Once you have changed tabs, you can control the brightness of the Steam Deck’s screen by using the slider under the “Brightness” header (2.).
If you find the brightness keeps changing to a level you are not happy with, you will want to disable “Adaptive brightness“. This technology is meant to help keep your screen’s brightness correct for your environment, but it isn’t perfect.
Disabling Adaptive Screen Brightness on the Steam Deck
In this section, we will show you how to disable the adaptive screen brightness on your Steam Deck.
Disabling this technology is useful when you aren’t happy with how it adjusts the brightness of the screen or if you prefer to set the brightness yourself.
1. To control the adaptive screen brightness setting you will want to change to the settings screen on your Steam Deck.
First, you will want to open the Steam Menu by tapping “STEAM Menu” in the bottom-left corner or pressing the STEAM button on your Deck.
2. With the Steam menu open, navigate down and select the “Settings” option.
3. Now that you are on the settings screen, use the sidebar to change to the “Display” settings page (1.).
Near the top of this page, you will find a toggle box labeled “Enable Adaptive Brightness“. Tap this option to disable this functionality (2.). If this function is disabled, the toggle will be gray; if it is enabled it will be blue.
You can also use this screen to change the brightness level of your Steam Deck’s screen. However, it is typically easier to just use the quick access panel.
Conclusion
If you have reached this point in the guide, you should now have a good understanding of how to control the brightness of the screen on your Deck.
Knowing how to adjust the brightness is helpful if you find things too challenging to see or if the screen is too bright in a dark environment. While the Deck has an adaptive screen brightness functionality, it isn’t perfect, and sometimes the brightness won’t adjust correctly.
Luckily, as seen in this guide, controlling the screen brightness is super easy.
Please feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions about adjusting the brightness of your Steam Deck screen.
If you found this quick guide to be helpful, we highly recommend investigating our many other Steam Deck guides.
