If you've started noticing that your Steam Deck is performing worse, you're not alone. It hasn't been widely discussed in the tech media, but there is information on Reddit and even GitHub. Here I'll explain a bit about what's going on, and I've partly figured it out because I've noticed the performance drop myself since updating to SteamOS 3.8. I didn't realize it at first, but it's definitely happening.
My personal experience with this SteamOS 3.8 issue began a little over a month ago. As I mentioned, I didn't notice it at first, partly because it had been a long time since I'd played Cyberpunk 2077. When I first played it, I saw that it had a conservative profile to run well on the Steam Deck, limited to 30fps and a few other tweaks. By removing the limit and with some other adjustments, the Deck can run Cyberpunk at around 50fps on average with some occasional drops.
The thing is, some time after finishing the main game, I played the Phantom Liberty expansion, and since it ran at around 30fps and supposedly had graphical improvements, I didn't pay much attention. That is, until my nephew started messing around with it, and then I began to take notice.
The performance problem in SteamOS 3.8 is real
All the alarm bells started ringing the third time I played Horizon Zero Dawn, currently my favorite game. The first time I played it, I got 30fps most of the time at 6TDP, only removing those limits while loading the Deck or when playing through a really difficult section. Without those limits, Horizon could run at 60fps, but this time I was only seeing around 45fps , 50 if I was lucky. And that configuration I used in the past? It made the frame rate drop to around 20fps.
That's when I started looking for some information, because it didn't seem normal at all. I searched on Startpage , but then I remembered that ChatGPT (among others) could save me time, so I asked them to look for related information. There are many links that discuss the problem, like this one from Reddit or this one from GitHub that talks about the issue in Red Dead Redemption 2.
Solutions: Comment on GitHub or downgrade to 3.7
There doesn't seem to be a solution at the moment, unless you downgrade to SteamOS 3.7. Some users claim to be able to recover 30fps depending on the game , which seems like a lot to me, but it's possible. The other thing you can do is comment on this GitHub thread , mainly so Valve is fully aware that there's a problem and it needs to be fixed as soon as possible.
From what they say, it also improves if you upgrade to 3.9, but at the moment it's in a preliminary phase and it's likely that other bugs will be experienced.
The Steam Machine does not appear to be affected.
It appears the Steam Machine isn't affected by the issue. It's possible it is, but the Machine is estimated to be six times more powerful than the Deck at the same resolution and about three times more powerful at 1080p. If there's a slight drop in performance, we might not notice it. The fact is, no users are complaining about it.
The problem is more serious on the Deck due to its limited hardware: it's like a 2021-2022 gaming PC that can handle games from that era, as long as they aren't the most demanding and at low resolutions. In many games, such as the aforementioned Cyberpunk 2077 and Horizon Zero Dawn, it can run well, but not without difficulty. A drop of about 15fps in a game that averages 40fps results in a frame rate of around 25fps, leaving us with a diminished experience.
And this is coming from someone who isn't too demanding and could play at 25fps, but only if it were stable and without drops. One drop leaves you at 15-18fps, and that's definitely too much.
So if your Steam Deck is performing poorly, you can either downgrade to SteamOS 3.7 or be patient, as Valve takes these issues very seriously and will surely fix them. The question is when.