this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Linux Gaming

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well... yeah, this is a thread about this patch. And the change in question is listed under "Steam Input", so I have to assume it's the polling rate of the built-in controller.

I'm not sure if that change is built into Steam Input on the standalone Linux version of Steam, but it's almost certainly not the issue your laptop has with battery life, even when gaming.

[–] farcaster@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Duh, I missed that it was under Steam Input. Yeah, most likely that's just controller polling. Amazing that somehow saves 6% battery.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago

I think it's a bit of a best case scenario, where they're using a very old game that will run with the lowest allowed 5W TDP with room to spare when locked to 30fps. At that point running the game probably burns so little power you can notice optimizations to stuff like wifi or the controllers. I bet the screen burns more power than the APU in that scenario.

If you're going full blast on a modern game at 30 the power save in percentage is probably trivial, so this seems like a weird combination of factors. But hey, it's a handheld, so every bit helps. Like I said above I just don't know if you'd feel the latency difference in some games where the controller handling is not tied to the display framerate, but I don't know how many PC ports there are where that'd be a thing.