Clever Steam Deck battery saver feature should be ready by early summer

pcgamer.com:

Valve and AMD have once again teamed up to help push through a major update for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack, one which could thereafter arrive with SteamOS 3.0 and improve on the Steam Deck's battery life. Known as dynamic Variable Rate Shading (VRS), it's likely going to be used to adjust the shading rate of a game to reduce power consumption when thermal or power limits are met. All automatically.

Dynamic VRS has just landed in Mesa 22.1 and the Radeon Vulkan Driver (RADV) in time for its full release expected sometime in May–June, reports Linux experts Phoronix. 

That's the open-source AMD graphics driver for the Vulkan API, which is used as by many games today and the API of choice for games on the Steam Deck. Most DirectX games will still run on the Steam Deck, of course, but they'll use the Proton DirectX-to-Vulkan translation layer to do so instead of running natively.

What VRS does is enable a game to use a lower shading rate where you will likely notice it less. Effectively the system will exert less effort in rendering a frame, thus improving performance for a measured loss in fidelity. The ideal here being a loss in fidelity that the player won't perceive, making this effectively 'free'.

Valve's Samuel Pitoiset has previously stated that the goal of dynamic VRS would be to deliver power savings, and not improved fps. The concept behind dynamic VRS is that the system will dynamically enable and disable VRS when certain thresholds are met. Say the Steam Deck is running too hot: the system will then lower the shading rate to drop a few Celsius. Or perhaps it's running out of battery, you could extend the life of the remaining juice by knocking back the shading rate in-game.

It could even be a case of when