Getting Games Running on Your Steam Deck
Most people buy the Deck and then spend three weeks just trying to figure out why their game runs like garbage or crashes on launch. The device itself works fine, but SteamOS, Proton, and game compatibility layers don't always play nice together. I've been running this machine since the preview units dropped and honestly it still surprises me how much friction exists between what Valve advertises and what actually runs smoothly. Let's start with the actual process rather than the theory. First thing you do is boot into desktop mode, not gaming mode. Gaming mode hides the useful configuration tools you'll need. From there, open your browser and navigate to the games you want to install. If you're buying from Steam directly, it's as simple as clicking install. If you're sideloading from outside the Steam store, you'll need to add those games through the library menu in desktop mode. Once a game is installed, go into its properties in your library. Right-click the game, select Properties, and look for the Compatibility section. There's a checkbox that says Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool. Check it and pick the latest Proton version available. Proton GE, or Garden Edition, is worth installing for games that use anti-cheat or specific DirectX versions. Grab it from the GitHub releases page and drop it into your Steam library/tools folder, then restart the Deck and the custom runtime should show up in that dropdown.
Performance settings live in the quick settings menu when you press the Steam button during gameplay. The power limit slider controls everything. Running a game at 15 watts gives you a lot more headroom than pushing it at the default. I usually set my power limit to 10-15W depending on the title and just let the frame rate breathe. It looks fine on a seven-inch screen at 800p. Most people waste battery and generate excess heat by not capping what they need. Controller layout is another area where people get stuck. The Deck supports mouse input through the trackpad, which matters for games that require precise clicking. Go into the controller configuration for any title and you can remap buttons, adjust stick sensitivity, and enable gyro aiming. Gyro is genuinely useful in shooters once you get used to it, but it takes about a week of actual play to adjust. Don't expect it to click on day one. Here's a specific problem I ran into that probably took me six hours to sort out. Trying to run Cyberpunk 2077 with an NVIDIA graphics card on a Windows PC, then bringing it to the Deck. The game launches, hits the menu, and then the whole thing freezes every time. Turns out the FSR upscaling was conflicting with the Deck's built-in image scaling. The workaround was setting FSR to performance mode in the game's own settings, then letting Steam Deck handle the resolution scaling from there instead of letting both systems fight over it. After that, it ran stable at 40 frames in the city areas. It still stutters occasionally during cutscenes because the shader compilation happens on the fly, but that's a hardware limitation nobody can fix short of waiting for the shader cache to build over a couple dozen play sessions.
Shader compilation stutter is one of those things that catches everyone off guard. The Deck builds shaders while you play and it causes microstutters that feel like the game is breaking. It's not broken. It's just doing its thing. Playing through five or six hours of any new game and the stuttering stops. This happens across literally every portable PC platform, not just Valve's device, but people act surprised by it anyway. Another counter-intuitive thing: sometimes turning off certain in-game features actually improves performance more than you'd expect. Things like motion blur, depth of field, and ambient occlusion cost more than most players realize on RDNA hardware. Disable them in the game's graphics settings before you even touch the Steam Deck performance overlay. I've seen single-digit performance gains from turning off motion blur alone. It sounds ridiculous until you see the frame time graph flatten out. For emulators, the process is different. You install the emulator through the browser in desktop mode, configure it manually, and then add the ROMs. Ryujinx for Switch emulation is currently the most capable but requires a lot of setup. Yuzu is dead since Nintendo shut it down and the source was pulled. Dolphin for Wii and GameCube works well with minimal configuration. PPSSPP for PSP is trivial to set up and runs most games at full speed. RetroArch covers the rest, though individual core performance varies.
Get the Full Details
If you're installing games from outside Steam entirely, like GOG titles, you'll want to use the GOG Galaxy launcher or just run the game directly from your portable drive. Either way, go into the game properties, check the compatibility force option, and try different Proton versions if the game doesn't launch. Proton Experimental often fixes things that stable Proton breaks, but stable Proton sometimes runs things better than the experimental branch. There's no reliable pattern, so you just cycle through them. The biggest bottleneck people hit is storage. The base model has 64 gigs of usable space, which is not enough for more than three or four modern AAA games. External microSD cards work fine but you lose some loading speed compared to the internal NVMe. Buying a Samsung T7 or similar portable SSD and connecting it through USB-C gives you nearly the same speed as internal storage for most games. I run three games off a SanDisk Extreme Pro through the USB port and the load times are indistinguishable from what I get off the built-in drive in practice. A few things don't work and you should know that upfront. Online multiplayer games with kernel-level anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty's newer titles, and Fortnite simply will not run on Deck. There is no workaround. Nothing you install will fix that. It's a hard limitation of how those anti-cheat systems interact with Linux, and Valve hasn't found a way around it. Don't waste time trying.
Games that require Always-On DRM like some older Ubisoft titles can be finnicky. The Ubisoft Connect client doesn't run smoothly on the Deck and the web version is the only reliable path. Launch Ubisoft games through the browser, sign in, and then play from there. It's clunky but it works. Keyboard and mouse support is built in but you have to enable it. Plug in any USB peripheral and the Deck should recognize it automatically. Wireless keyboards sometimes need a moment to register. If the OS doesn't detect your mouse within thirty seconds of plugging in, reboot into desktop mode and check the USB settings. I've had one instance where a cheap wireless dongle needed a different USB-C port to function properly, but that's hardware variance, not a software issue. Updating the Deck itself matters more than most people think. Valve pushes BIOS and firmware updates regularly and these sometimes fix game compatibility that was broken before. Check Settings, System, Power, and make sure you're on the latest firmware before you complain about a game not running. I saw a fix in a recent update that resolved texture flickering in Elden Ring that had been bugging people for months. Nothing else changed, just the firmware.
Thermal throttling is real but manageable. The Deck doesn't have active cooling management as sophisticated as a laptop, so sustained loads will cause clock speeds to drop after about twenty to thirty minutes of intense gaming. Playing something like Baldur's Gate 3 or Horizon Forbidden West at maximum settings will throttle faster than you might expect. Dropping shadow quality and ray tracing settings to medium cuts thermals significantly and maintains consistent frame rates. The difference between a throttled 30fps and a steady 30fps is night and day in terms of how smooth the experience feels, even though the number looks the same on paper. Save data backup is something I wish more people handled proactively. Steam Cloud handles most titles automatically, but saves for non-Steam games and some older titles sit on the local drive. I back up my entire saves folder to a cloud service monthly. The path is ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/. It's not glamorous advice but losing hundreds of hours of progress because the unit bricked during an update is avoidable with fifteen minutes of work every few weeks.
