Moving to the new OLED Steam Deck, I was hoping one of my biggest complaints with the Deck would be resolved - on WiFI downloads in Steam being sub-par in the speed department. Unfortunately, they’re still quite poor for me.

The strange thing is, it seems to only be for Steam downloads, and only WiFi. I can reliably Speedtest at 900-940 Mbps on dock provided Wired Ethernet. Even on WiFi, Speedtests in desktop mode match the reported Link speed of the connected WiFi interface (~500 Mbps in my case). Downloading from the Battle.net app in desktop mode, on WiFi, I was able to average 45-50 MB/s (so, ~400 Megabits/s).

The problem appears with Steam downloads on WiFi. The best I’ve ever seen on the new OLED is 120 Mb/s (but often less than that). This occurs in both gaming and desktop mode. For what it’s worth, this is downloading to the SSD of my regular 1 TB OLED Deck, so disk write speed should not be a limiting factor. I regularly see 700-800 Mb/s Steam downloads on wired for both my desktop and the Deck while docked on wired Ethernet.

Does anybody else have a similar experience? I would expect the real world downloads in Steam on WiFi to at least match those I see from the Battle.net client, but that just isn’t so!

I’ve tried a few things I’ve seen reported, such as forcing DNS (perhaps for better geolocation of CDNs?), Changing to different Geo locations around me, forcing a high download limit (as well as having no limit), and the Dev option for 5GHz WiFi power management, but all result in the same lacklustre speeds of no more than 120 Mb/s (just for Steam!)