Having been able to test the Steam Deck ahead of its official release later this month, Gamers Nexus has discovered that battery life can vary greatly. In the tests they have been able to carry out, they noticed that the Steam Deck's battery can be depleted in as little as 87 minutes.
How not, depends on the game users are playing and what settings the games are running on. It's something that happened with the PSP, nintendo ds, PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS, whose most graphically advanced games ended up consuming more battery. In the case of the PSP, they consumed more physical games due to the physical parts to move the UMD disk during its reading and therefore the installation of data on the Memory Stick was encouraged.
If you use strong games, the Steam Deck battery drains fast
In their tests, Gamers Nexus used the Steam Deck at 50% brightness with the audio completely off. Running Devil May Cry on its highest graphics settings with VSync enabled to limit frames, SteamDeck drains its battery after two hours of use. By increasing the graphics settings of the game and with VSync disabled, the console drains its battery in 87 minutes. That's it a difference of at least 33 minutes of battery life.
That battery life is well short of the two hours that Valve advertises on the Steam Deck specs page. But that figure should be viewed with some skepticism. Valve indicated that the console's battery lasts between two and eight hours, a huge margin that probably takes into account the games that are being played. Gamers Nexus took this into account during their tests and decided to run Dead Cells with Vsync enabled, and in this case the battery lasted just under six hours.
It is to be expected that the more restrained games graphically and at the CPU level will drain the battery less. But we are already warned that in extreme cases, the battery can last less than two hours.
Source: Digital Trends
