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Proton 9.0-4
Steam Deck OLED
Steam OS Build 20250630.1
Games tested:
DOOM 64
DOOM + DOOM II
Quake
Quake II
Rise of the Triad Ludicrous Edition
Star Wars Dark Forces Remastered
I've noticed very odd behavior with the KEX engine games that I own. A lot of them default to Borderless, and when in that mode the CPU consumes way more power than it should.
For example, Dark Forces chugs down 11 watts of power idling in the main menu, 5 watts of which is the CPU. ROTT likes to jump around 8-10 watts during gameplay with the cpu hovering around 3500 mhz also utilizing about 5 watts of power.
The only way to get SOME of these games to under 7 watts is by changing their display mode to Fullscreen, native res. Vsync doesn't seem to make a reliable difference. DOOM 64, DOOM + DOOM II, Quake, and Quake II all sip on power at 5.5-7 watts (Quake II maxes out at 8) as long as they are running in fullscreen and native res.
Even still, some games, like the aforementioned Dark Forces and ROTT, will stay at about 9-11 watts no matter what you do. The only way to get them down to a reasonable 6-7 watts is by setting a TDP limit of about 5 and a GPU clock of 1600. This starves the CPU and forces it to down clock to about 2100mhz, while the performance stays rock solid at 90fps. I already brought this up to Nightdive and they suggested this CPU behavior might be a Proton issue
=================================================
Proton 9.0-4
Steam Deck OLED
Steam OS Build 20250630.1
Games tested:
DOOM 64
DOOM + DOOM II
Quake
Quake II
Rise of the Triad Ludicrous Edition
Star Wars Dark Forces Remastered
I've noticed very odd behavior with the KEX engine games that I own. A lot of them default to Borderless, and when in that mode the CPU consumes way more power than it should.
For example, Dark Forces chugs down 11 watts of power idling in the main menu, 5 watts of which is the CPU. ROTT likes to jump around 8-10 watts during gameplay with the cpu hovering around 3500 mhz also utilizing about 5 watts of power.
The only way to get SOME of these games to under 7 watts is by changing their display mode to Fullscreen, native res. Vsync doesn't seem to make a reliable difference. DOOM 64, DOOM + DOOM II, Quake, and Quake II all sip on power at 5.5-7 watts (Quake II maxes out at 8) as long as they are running in fullscreen and native res.
Even still, some games, like the aforementioned Dark Forces and ROTT, will stay at about 9-11 watts no matter what you do. The only way to get them down to a reasonable 6-7 watts is by setting a TDP limit of about 5 and a GPU clock of 1600. This starves the CPU and forces it to down clock to about 2100mhz, while the performance stays rock solid at 90fps. I already brought this up to Nightdive and they suggested this CPU behavior might be a Proton issue