Steam Deck UMA Frame Buffer Size: What it is and How it Increases Performance?
The UMA Frame Buffer Size BIOS setting is set to 1GB by default, but setting it to 4GB can increase performance.
Written Tutorial
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coming soon!
Mentioned Links
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Steam Deck BIOS - • How to Boot the Steam Deck into BIOS & UEF...
My Steam Deck Accessories (affiliate links below)
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Summary
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By default, the Steam Deck is set to only reserve 1GB of RAM as VRAM. Your games have the ability to request this to be incrased by up to 8GB, but that back and forth can result in some lag and a bit less performance.
It also makes it difficult to run Windows on the Steam Deck with the default setup.
So today, I'll show you how to increase this from 1GB to 4GB
Why you may want to make this change
And the few times when this may not be the best option.
increase UMA Frame Buffer Size
To begin, you will need to reboot your Steam Deck into BIOS mode.
This is done by Powering Off the devcie and then holding the Volume Up button while it boots back up.
If you're not familiar with BIOS on the Steam Deck, I'll have a dedicated guide linked in the video description below. As well as the pinned comment so that it's easy for everyone to find.
From this menu, we select the Setup Utility option.
And then we're going to dive into the Advanced BIOS menu for the Steam Deck.
Scroll through this list until you find the UMA Frame Buffer Size option
Which you can see, is set to 1GB by default.
But we can manually change this to as much as 4GB or as little as 256MB.
After we change the value, press the button up here to save and exit
And then confirm the changes.
Your Steam Deck will reboot on its own, and it should load up SteamOS like normal.
why increase this setting?
So, if you're curious as to why it can benefit you to make this change, let's first talk about what this means.
With the default setting, you're telling SteamOS to dedicate 1GB of your RAM as VRAM for any game you're playing.
SteamOS will be able to request as much as 8GB, but you have to remember that the CPU will have priorty over the GPU.
So if you're playing games that are CPU heavy, which causes the system to use a lot of RAM for it, then the GPU may be bottlenecked since it's unable to load more textures into the RAM.
Setting this feature to 4GB will reserve at least 4GB of RAM as VRAM, causing less of a hit to performance in those cases when your GPU needs it.
Since there's less back and forth between the hardware and the software, having this set to 4GB can also result in less Power usage as well.
If you're worried about reserving too much RAM as VRAM here, you could also change this to 2GB as that will effectively double the amount of RAM dedicated for textures.
Things to Watch
With all of that said, there are some edge cases where changing this setting to 4GB may not result in an increase in performance.
I've read that Red Dead Redemption 2 is setup in a way that when this feature is set to 4GB then it will only have 4GB of VRAM. Compared to if this setting was left to 1GB, it could then use as much as 6GB for VRAM.
That won't make the game unplayable. . .or cause massive drops in FPS.
But it could result in your game going from 45 frames per second to around 40.
This, however, seems to be a bug with the game itself. . .or possibly it's just how it has been programmed.
As I have not seen this happen in many other games.
But if you notice something like this with a game you're playing, share the details down in the comments section below.
conclusion
There's a reason why Valve set this to 1GB as the default.
But in most cases, you will get a bit of a boost in performance while also noticing less heat generation due to the GPU and CPU having to negotiate less frequently. Which should result in a slight increase in battery life as well.
But please, share your experience with this setting down below.
I would greatly appreciate it if you would give this video a like while also subscribing to the channel.
Once I get up to 1,000 subscribers I should be able to dedicate more time to the channel. So you'll have that much more Steam Deck content from me.
1. Intro [00:00]
2. Increase UMA Frame Buffer Size [00:42]
3. Why Increase this Setting? [02:19]
4. Things to Look Out For [03:57]
5. Conclusion [05:09]