Performance tip for Steam Deck players running Legacy of the Dragonborn

I’m way behind on my playthrough posting, but that doesn’t mean I’m not playing; I am! I’ve finished up both Finds-The-Way’s and Elessir’s Skyrim runs, and I’m chugging away through Kendeshel’s.

And in Kendeshel’s in particular, I made a discovery I want to share for any other players who match these three criteria:

1. Playing Skyrim’s Anniversary Edition
2. Playing on a Steam Deck
3. Running, or wanting to run, the Legacy of the Dragonborn mod

In recent Kendeshel sessions, I’d started seeing some recurring performance issues, but only inside the museum added to the game by Legacy of the Dragonborn. The performance hit would come out of the blue, usually in three specific places inside the museum: the Hall of Heroes, the Safehouse, and the Hall of Wonders.

I was starting to be concerned that something was fucked in my load order, maybe to the degree that I was going to have to bail on the playthrough–which would have sucked, given that Kendeshel as of this writing is level 73, and I am not done with her yet. But then I made a couple of discoveries.

One: in gaming mode on the Deck, I don’t normally have my FPS visible on screen. But in Desktop mode, if I happen to launch a game that way, I do turn on the FPS counter and have it down in the lower left corner, in a bright green font so I can easily read it. And I happened to launch the game in Desktop mode, at which point I noticed I was getting frame rates around 90.

And I did a double-take at that, because I’d learned that Skyrim’s engine has issues over 60fps, without mod assistance. Mind you, I’m also aware that at least in theory, the mod SSE Display Tweaks–which I am running in Kendeshel’s load order–is supposed to help with that.

But in an abundance of caution, I decided to lock my Skyrim to 60fps. This is super easy to do on the Deck, and you can even do it on a per-game basis if you want to limit a specific game but no others. There are lots of articles and videos out there about how to do this, but here are the specific steps I personally followed:

1. With Skyrim running, hit the Quick Access button (that’s the one just underneath the right trackpad)
2. With the left joystick, navigate to the Performance screen (the one with the charge symbol, right in the middle of the list that pops up)
3. Activate the “Advanced View” button
4. In Advanced View, toggle on “Use per-game profile”
5. On the Frame Limit slider, move the slider down to 60 FPS (60 Hz) (and note here that the Deck’s operating system is controlling both your FPS and your screen’s refresh rate with this one slider)

Additionally, I decided to toggle on a TDP limit. This is done on the same screen as the above settings. I turned the relevant toggle on, and set the slider to 10W. I decided to do this just because I saw this as another tip on ways to improve performance on your Deck. I am not a hundred percent sure it was necessary. But I decided to try it anyway, just out of curiosity; your mileage may vary.

Two: I also learned that by default, the Deck is set to have 1G of VRAM by default. And when I mentioned this to my wife, she was all “How does anyone play anything at 1G of VRAM?!”

To do this, I followed the instructions on this article: 10 Ways To Optimize Steam Deck Performance

And now I have 4G of VRAM active on my Deck!

The result of all this: last couple sessions I’ve played with Kendeshel, I have not had the same performance hits. I’ve been able to go through the impacted sections of my museum just fine, and there is no noticeable effect yet on any other aspect of the game.

Now, I’ve changed multiple things here, and it’s not clear to me necessarily which one actually helped. Most likely, it’s the VRAM or the FPS limit; there are good arguments for either of those being the cause.

Either way, for the few other Steam Deck players out there who are running (or who might want to run) Legacy of the Dragonborn, keep this in mind as a potential solution if you run into the same performance issues I’ve been seeing! Maybe it’ll help.