News Steam Deck Framerate Limiter Egregiously Raises Input Latency

[Admin]

Redditor shares test results concerning the framerate limiter function in the Steam Deck.

Steam Deck Framerate Limiter Egregiously Raises Input Latency : Read more

 

[Kdevonish]

I get that as web "journalists" you get paid per word and click. But is this the best this article could offer? A blow by blow review of a Reddit post?

Did TH verify these findings themselves? Did you confirm them and then find that they were 'egregious' rendering the Steam Deck basically unplayable with these settings? Are they 'egregious' for all games available on the Steam Deck or just for highly competitive games? Will I notice if I'm emulating games or if I'm playing slower paced titles?

If the article isn't going to add context to what you are reporting, or demonstrate the expertise and perspective of staff at TH, then you might as well just link to the Reddit post and call it a day. No need to basically copy the post while adding nothing else of value.

But I get it: clicks keep the lights on...

 

[cryoburner]

Enforcing a 30 FPS cap increased to 145.9ms, more than 4X higher. According to the Redditor's results, the worst configuration was the 40 Hz, 20 FPS setting, causing the input latency to skyrocket to 232ms, over 7X more than the uncapped setting.

I somehow doubt that someone locking their frame rate to 20fps is going to care all that much about a 200ms increase in input latency. Most games would be uncomfortable to play at that frame rate either way.

As for the 60fps cap, the increased latency was still on par with their results for the Switch, so I don't see much problem there. And even latency at the 30fps cap is arguably not that bad, at least for the kinds of games one would play at 30fps.

This is a power-saving feature, so it's probably a bit of a stretch to call it a "malfunction", if it is in fact saving power when on battery. I suppose they could decouple the input sampling from the frame rate though, assuming that doesn't affect the power-saving capabilities much. Or add a reduced-latency power-saving option. I imagine the power saving feature is just inserting a delay between each frame, and the input may be getting averaged over the course of several frames.

 

[Kellog]

Have they fixed this yet? And is it expected to be fixed?

 

[LordVile]

Isn’t this basically just the vsync latency issue?