Steam Deck battery life could be improved by this smart graphics tech

techradar.com:

Here’s some more good news to fend off the battery life concerns recently aired about the Steam Deck, as it seems another feature is set to come to the handheld PC to boost its battery longevity.

Namely Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which has made the cut to be included with the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver, and as Phoronix reports, that should be released around May or June time.

It should then find its way to SteamOS 3.0, the operating system of the Steam Deck – remember, Vulkan is the API of choice with Valve’s Linux-powered hardware (DirectX games will use a translation layer) – and subsequently benefit games on the portable PC by reducing their power usage.

What VRS does is tweak the game’s shading rate to use less GPU resources (and therefore less power – which means more battery life when playing any given game). The idea with VRS is that shading is downplayed in areas of the screen which aren’t important, like the far edges you’re not really looking at, reducing overall rendering demands while not making any noticeable impact to image quality.

Theoretically, this feature could alternatively be used to push up frame rates, but as PC Gamer points out, Valve’s Samuel Pitoiset has previously said that VRS is going to be targeted at taming power usage on the device. Dynamic VRS will work seamlessly in the background, kicking in if the Steam Deck’s internal temperatures start to rise too much (or indeed perhaps as a battery saver mode, when the battery gets low).

Whatever the case, this tech is firmly aimed at boosting battery life and not frame rates for the Steam Deck.

VRS isn’t the only feature incoming for the Steam Deck which aims to preserve battery life, doubtless to the relief of those who’ve been reading recent reports