With a refresh rate of 60 Hz for the Steam Deck and 90 Hz for the Steam Deck OLED, gamers are still far from being able to enjoy their favorite games at 120 fps. While waiting for an improvement on this side, why not with Steam Deck 2, a recent (unofficial) solution allows this limitation to be lifted on both Valve consoles: a free mod. Good news, its installation is both simple and quick.
More frames per second on Steam Decks
While the first Steam Deck OLEDs are just starting to ship, developers are already starting to offer improvements. On Forgejo, user Nyaaori has indeed shared a free mod to increase the refresh rate of Valve’s portable consoles.
Named “Steam Deck Refresh Rate Expender”, it increases the refresh rate of the first Steam Deck to 70 Hz, and to 120 Hz for the OLED version equipped with BOE and SDC screens. Please note, however, that the developer has not tested his mod with Samsung’s Oled screens.
The trials of the first users seem conclusive, offering as agreed a welcome additional I/S to enjoy games even more on Valve’s portable consoles. All is not rosy however, with some feedback reporting small failures in terms of gamma and brightness when you exceed 110 Hz on the Steam Deck OLED.
The developer specifies that the mod was tested under SteamOS 3.5.7. It may therefore not work on future versions, or even betas and previews.
In case you want to try the experiment, follow the following steps: go to desktop mode, download the install-rre.sh file, and run the command “sudo bash install-rre.sh” in the terminal.
As a reminder, installing a mod can cause various problems to the Steam Deck, or even make it unusable. As a precaution, it is recommended to make a backup of your Steam Deck by creating a recovery image. Thus, any problem can be corrected by reinstalling its version of SteamOS without the mod.