Don’t worry, you are very much not alone. This happens to me too. Prey was doing it within twenty minutes, every time, the Yuzu emulator too and pretty much any demanding title. It’s definitely a software issue and a bug that’s appeared since 3.5. There’s another two posts about it (if you keep scrolling for a long whole haha) with multiple people commenting to say they have the same issue. You won’t have to return your Deck. This will be fixable, either through user methods or, eventually and hopefully soon, standard updates.

Changing the vram to 4gb seems to have fixed it for me, I haven’t removed Docky, but I haven’t had time to extensively test it to be certain. However I did sneak two hours of play in Prey yesterday and it didn’t crash.

Given it always happened when the performance monitor was reporting more than 4gb of vram in use, and that Yuzu has recently been suffering from a vram memory leak bug, I really do think the issue is vram related. People have been saying the issue doesn’t happen in Desktop mode but I haven’t tried playing any games in that mode to test (other than one but I don’t know how demanding it was on vram). It could be a bug with Gamescope, the Game mode window manager.

Here is how to change the vram

https://youtube.com/shorts/4pqfH2gYH1k?si=456vc7kUwJRG32ef