I’ve found in a bunch of games I can target lower framerates at lower tdps and drop my Temps and battery usage a lot. But shouldn’t the deck know it doesn’t need to work so hard on its own? If I don’t drop tdp the deck might still go full jet engine even though there’s no change in fps with the refresh I’m targeting
Some games will use as much performance as allowed, they will run as fast as possible, meaning they will max out the CPU. The Steam Deck can’t tell if the game ‘needs’ that performance or not, it just fulfils requests for performance from the game. So the TDP cap lets you limit it.