Lately, I've been playing games in Desktop Mode on my Steam Deck. I used to play games on Game Mode. Below I'll explain why I switched and some of the difficulties I have faced after losing the quality-of-life features that the Game Mode offers.
Game Mode
When you start up Steam Deck out of the box, it starts in Game Mode. It's the unique feature for SteamOS that separates it from other Linux distros. In Game Mode, you have access to many customization features via the ... button's Quick Access Overlay, including:
- Performance Overlay (Real-time FPS, Power, CPU/GPU Usage Metrics)
- Per-game Performance Profiles
- Changing TDP/GPU Limits
- Adjusting Frame Rate and Refresh Rate
- Controller Layout Customization
- etc.
There are things you can't do in Game Mode, like installing Desktop Applications and accessing the Terminal. You can't open any app or a game that has not been added to Steam, (though you can add them to Steam in Game Mode via Nested Desktop.) Even with these limitations, Game Mode offers a straight forward experience, and I love it.
OBS Studio
One limitation of Game Mode, however, is that OBS Studio doesn't work correctly in it. I managed to get it work by following a tutorial on Youtube. Add it to Steam and enable gstreamer. It worked for a while, and I didn't
Everything changed when I upgraded OBS Studio to the newest version. It stopped working in Game Mode. Apparently gstreamer doesn't support the new versions of OBS Studio, and I forgot which version I had installed before the upgrade!!!
I looked for a solution everywhere, but I couldn't find any... So, I looked over my options from the beginning.
Other 'Game Mode' Options for Recording Videos
Other than OBS, two options allow you to record videos in Game Mode. The first one is Decky Recorder a Decky Loader plugin that works well. But I didn't like the video quality using it, and I couldn't customize it like I wanted as with OBS Studio.
The other option is Steam's Built-in Recording system, which is still in Beta at the time of writing. I love how customizable it is, but it won't work for me as it doesn't allow exporting longer videos to .mp4 on Steam Deck. It only allows saving Clips for now, which isn't what I need.
So, back to Desktop Mode I go...
Desktop Mode
On Desktop Mode, OBS Studio works perfectly. I think it's because Game Mode uses an architechture called Wayland for display while OBS only works on X11. I don't have a lot of experience on this, so I asked ChatGPT about it.
https://inleo.io/threads/view/ahmadmanga/re-ahmadmanga-3fdl5oca
One thing I noticed was that games become a lot slower when I play them while recording. I tried many soultions, from changing Display Settings to lower the Quality of the Video Games' graphics.
In the end, the solution that finally worked was interesting: Go to Game Mode and change the default TDP!
Apparently, the TDP chosen in Game Mode affects the Desktop Mode, and I have set the default TDP really low! (The one in the general profile, not any game-specific one.) Once I changed the TDP, everything works fine now in Desktop Mode. Though, the Battery Life will be slighly lower due to the TDP increase.
Anyway, I'll be playing games, and recording my gaming footage in Desktop Mode for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading and following my works!
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