this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
73 points (97.4% liked)
Steam Deck
14945 readers
38 users here now
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That you can change the VRAM size from 1 GB up to 4 GB in the BIOS.
Are there any drawbacks?
Well, that means the system RAM left for the CPU is 12 GB instead of 15, since the CPU and the GPU share the same 16 GB pool. So any system RAM heavy games would suffer.
Realistically, going down to 12GB System RAM from 15GB is not very noticeable compared to going from 1GB to 4GB VRAM and so I think it should be preferred. If you ran into issues with a very RAM heavy game (unlikely), you could change it to 14GB + 2GB, or go all the way back to 15GB + 1GB. If you are using the Steam Deck on an external display that is higher resolution than its native 1280x800 display, you should probably do 12GB + 4GB to make room for higher resolution textures. Haven't tested this, but if there were noticable differences, I would think these are the most likely scenarios for them to crop up.
Worth noting that the default isn't 1GB. The default is "auto" and the Deck will try to dynamically adjust between more VRAM and more system RAM as needed.
This works fine for most games, but for some it helps if all 4GB is immediately visible without having to ramp up.