CryoUtility, Decky Tools, and increasing the Virtual Ram are an amazing addition for every steam deck

“Yeah man, I wanna do it” never fails to make me laugh 😂

welp. i did it, i pulled the trigger and ordered a steam deck last night. hopefully it comes in fast and i get to have fun with it! Edit: from this comment to 3 days. it took 3 days which will be tomorrow for me. my deck will be here. i ordered it at something like 3am the night of this posted video and its here in less then 3 nights. my hard drives wont even be here till next week! i do got a spare 128sd and will use the stock 64gb to test some emulation. and with the new file transfer over lan ill try a few small games much faster now

This has been one of the best things I've done on my deck, Kyle is also really helpful if you're not a programming wizard

This guide really stabilized my emulation performance. Shadow The Hedgehog in particular had some bad dips by default but now it never drops below 45 fps. Thanks for the great informative content.

if you scroll all the way down on the power tools settings you can enable per game settings and itll automatically disable smt only for those games you want to and dont have to constantly switch it on and off yourself

In the default deck settings on the emulation I can see the frame-to-frame stuttering very easily. cryoutilities definitely makes a huge difference on the frame-to-frame smoothness.

i am a simple man, i see a new retrogamecorps video and i'm like "yeah, i wanna do it"

I feel like the lack of stuttering is the largest improvement for me. Some games felt unbearable due to the stutter. For example, GTA 4 had a good amount of stutter for me no matter what compatibility Proton I used or settings which caused me to give up halfway through the game. After installing CryoUtil I was curious to see how it would fare and it seemed to eliminate all but the smallest amount of stuttering. That to me is by far the largest improvement even moreso than the some of the slight FPS gains. This is the case for most of the games that had massive stuttering previously which are nearly all gone and if they do arise its at a tolerable level at least for me. CryoUtil is well worth the installation you are sensitive to stuttering like myself.

I'm hoping Valve implements a lot of these tools directly into the OS

Thanks Russ, I've been watching Cryobytes channel for a while and wanted to use this but figured because of the amount of technical detail I thought I would need to understand it more first... This vid simplifying the process was what I needed, set it up last night - though was playing Dead Cells Castlevania DLC so didn't really feel any impact yet 🤓

Thanks very much for this video! I played Star Wars Jedi Survivor on the steam deck and the game crashed always in one situation so that I couldn‘t play the game further. Now with cryoutilities installed it works!! The force be with you 😄

This is literally the best tutorial I’ve ever seen related to the steam deck. Instant subscriber thank you

Thanks, Russ! I was just waiting for someone like you to review this before jumping in.

I LOVE Cryoutilites. It made guardians of the Galaxy stable playable for me. I've never had a performance issue since using it. Also loving the steam deck content as well! You're one Windeck review away from the steam deck infinity gauntlet being completed!

Isn't the lower RAM utilization caused by you essentially having less RAM because it's alocated to your VRAM?

Thank you dude. Your tutorials are crystal clear.

Your intro is amazing!

Thanks for the little tips for emulation !

Cryo 2.0 fixed my game from crashing! I'm playing phantom brigade. It use to crash before.

Found the 500gb steam deck for $400 last night. Guy was clearing inventory before he submits taxes lol blessed 🙏🏼

All of us loving all of these utilities !!!

Literally made the thread change you suggested while playing Breath of the Wild and noticed immediate stabilization and so far a consistent 30 fps

3:31 actually there is a easier way to do this Press the start icon setting>system settings in the side bar they’ll be a section called user settings. Click change password and type it in twice. Afterwards it’ll ask if you want to update your wallet password and just click no. Bam your password is set

I don’t know what I was doing wrong but after I installed cryoutilities my fps on resident evil remasters went up from 30 low settings to 60 all max out and stable. Wow this thing really works

Very informative thank you for the video and thanks to the developers of these applications.

between cryoutilities and powertools, I've managed to get consistently better performance out of just about everything with one quick tweak or another. not always significantly better performance, but always better.

New World stopped working for me after some recent patches within the game, it just would not start after character creation no matter where I was logged out in or out of a city but after doing this I was able to play again, this works! I can even start the game within a city something I couldn't do before!! thanks for this video

Total RAM/VRAM is shared on the Steam Deck. When you allocate more RAM to video memory, it only makes sense that it would use less regular RAM because it's already being used as VRAM. Can't use what isn't there.

This helped me alot thank you sir big difference

Love this, just bought a Steam Deck and waiting on it in the mail, and I'm saving all your starter guides so I can implement these utilities on it. Especially for Switch games, as I don't want to buy a switch just to play a handful few games (mainly anything Metroid and Bayonetta)

Thank you very much for this vid this mod helped alot in starfield on my steam deck.

I just installed it yesterday. I love it so much.

best Vid, clear and easy to follow

Fun fact everyone when you were creating your pseudo-password nothing will pop up. Just make sure what you’re typing down is what you want as your password before you hit enter because once you do one of the only way to change it, is to format your system.

Figure it can't hurt. Got it installed. Thanks!

Got recommended your video to resolve Palworld randomly freezing the SD around every 30 mins. Hoping this’ll resolve that problem & gave a solid 30fps with mid settings so I don’t look like I’m playing on a console with AV on an HDTV

This makes armored core 6 run like a dream. Thanks

Awesome a preformance boost for my beloved Steam Deck! 👍

Well, how much does allocating 4GB to VRAM and deactivating SMT do without CryoUtilities active? The VRAM thing is so the system doesn't need to do memory allocation on the fly (it's the same for 4800U laptop, but there I found 2GB to work better than 4GB) as setting it to 1GB isn't a hard limit for how much RAM can be used as VRAM. The on the fly allocation might be the reason for small studders, when the GPU starts using more then 1GB. Higher RAM usage with 1GB might be also because the system is reserving more RAM, in case it needs to allocate more for the GPU, but not sure about this. Turning off SMT for better performance in games was quite common in the earlier years of SMT / Hyperthreading. Over time they got better in recognising which cores are heavily taxed so the second thread on said cores wouldn't be utilised for other threads, especially not demanding ones.

For Yuzu did you experiment with pinning the GPU clock along with disabling SMT? For me, pinning thr GPU to 1300-1600MHz provides a nice improvement in most titles.

installed it last week, and really makes the difference, now motor storm is playable steady 30fps 100% resolution pcs3, and MS pacific rift is playable now at 75% resolution

Hell yeah, always love seeing cryo utilities getting more love:)

I dunno if they fixed it yet, but for a while the 4GB VRAM trick was the only way to get Marvel’s Midnight Suns to run on deck. Without it, it would crash during loading of a new day, every time.

Love this!

It's using less RAM because you've made less RAM available to the system. The Deck APU shares the RAM between the CPU and the GPU component. By allocating 4GB to VRAM you've made less RAM available to the CPU. Normally the CPU has 15GB to work with (GPU has 1GB), but after the BIOS change it only has 12GB (4GB for VRAM). The OS (and anything else you have running in the background) is consuming some of that already so it isn't surprising the game would have less RAM allocated to it after the BIOS change. If you set the metrics to max info you should see this reflected in the RAM / VRAM breakdown. ~8GB is good enough for games, the tweak is still worth it but it is a bit of an illusion that the set of tweaks makes the games take up less RAM.

I remember someone saying to check the settings again after a major steamos/bios update just to be safe. To me, the most useful function of the utility is the ability to shift shader cache/compat data to microsd if the games are installed there, so that people who do not replace the 64gb ssd do not need to worry about it filling up despite games being placed on the microsd.

You run built-in game benchmark to see FPS difference and sync the videos later.

Utilites realized by CryoShinchan !

cryoutilities is a must out of the box. its the difference between 45fps on Hogwarts and 60fps. at least for me

Hey Russ, you should try to update power tools and set cpu governor to "performance" there. This setting almost eliminates all stuttering and fps drops in yuzu. Tested in "Super Mario Odysee" and it works flawless. I only got some stutters in the begining of the levels.

I've found this utility to make an enormous difference in Dead Space. That game in particular is atrociously optimized and seems to enjoy flooding the IO with pointless re-compilation of shaders or something at every turn. The efficiency changes in memory handling are just stellar there because the data streaming is so overwhelming that overall system latency seems to be a limiting factor.

Loving the Nintendo Switch Pro Content

Russ great video. Do u find you need to do less tweaking to steam games now that you r running this new software.

Great guide! Also watched cryobytes in depth video. I am using the latest yuzu and links awakening still has some pretty horrible stuttering and frame dips down into the low 30s. Did you change any of the other settings aside from docked mode and smt?

Just makes me all the sadder my deck was stolen/lost about a month ago. All these wonderful updates and new apps...

LoL I kept pressing Volume Down instead of vol up when trying to get to the VRAM utility screen. Don't do this at midnight boys and gals. 🎉

On the contrary, my performance has decreased and gpu behaves very strangely in games, sharply increasing and reducing the load

I also wanna join the hype for cryo and his very good job. Ps2 emulator stopped audio and visual mini stuttering. Game changer quite literally

For me performance with SMT off on PS3 emulation was actully worse than before. But overall perfomance is more smooth with CryoUtilities so thx for the video

Russ please make a vid on retro arc with old arcade games I can't for the life of me find out what's compatible like final Burn Neo or mame I didn't play games from that error and would like too

So does adjusting the VRAM like this shorten the lifespan of the drive in any substantial way?

So does this video still hold up today? Should I still do all this and the 4gig thing?

I'm wondering if the lower RAM utilization is actually a bad thing. Not a systems engineer, but it's possible that the steam deck tries to leave some headroom in its RAM usage at any given time in case of spikes. But hey, if you notice smoother performances, that memory is probably better utilized by VRAM. I haven't watched Kyle's video yet, but I bet he found that 1 gb VRAM cap was being hit there.

If you increase the dedicated VRAM by 3 GB your available system RAM shrinks by the same amount (since they are shared), so in total you lose 1 GB of available system RAM that way. The steam Deck will reallocate system memory for GPU use even if the dedicated memory is exceeded. That's why the system memory load is 2 GB higher if you leave the VRAM at default settings.

After watching Cryo's video and reading his comments/donations, I was expecting DRASTIC improvements. Truly the only thing I saw was a dash more smoothness, but like you said nothing life changing. FPS is truly neglegiable. I mean I'll take what I can get, but thank you for confirming my experience.

With steam os 3.5 available, will this still be a reasonable mod to do?

Hello, great video, maybe u can make video about Xenia Canary on steam deck and its optimization?

Nice Video, thanks. With the current Sale of the SD, isn’t the SD the best Emulation Device? Why would ich buy an Ambernic or such?

IM EARLY Also, I'm waiting on my Deck to come in, since I bought from...I'll say Not Valve, the shipping is going horrible, but I'm hopefully it'll come in eventually. EDIT: Hi, if you came here and were wondering, "did it ever come in?" The answer is no. No it did not. I got scammed. But I got refunded and bought it off Steam itself. Please learn from me. Don't do what I did. Buy the Deck off Steam itself. And yes. I am an idiot.

Is this all still relevant today? I know the OLED Steam Deck solved a lot of micro stuttering on just a hardware level. Should I still be using this videos advice in 2024 on an OLED steam deck?

Also you mention holding volume up and power then letting both go. However (at least on 1TB OLED deck) its hold power while you press power button once.

Brah, why didn’t valve do whatever this guy did with cryo. Or better yet hire him asap. The difference is night and day

I didn't get my steam deck today co's the seller never paid extra for royal mail saturday delivery lol. So on monday I shall take a look at this.

valve should make this an official update and hire these guys like msi did with msi afterburner dev team

Not really seeing the benefit from this, only is a few and certain scenes/situations was there a real improvement in fps. Unless I missed something?

Id love to see your thoughts on the NYXI Wizard Wireless Joy-pad

I was reccomend to do this because my unsupported games would slow down and then eventually freeze my entire SteamDeck. I would then eventually have to force my steam deck off then turn it on. Does anyone else have this issue?

Cryoutility seems to even out frame generation for heavy games which gives the illusion the game is running smoother. The actual frame rate difference seems negligible at best.

So do you have to resync game data every time you install a new game? Or is it also a one time set it and forget it option?

Currently testing these options out my console sometimes turn off between 80% to 55% playing AAA games such as ghosts of tsushima days gone GTA etcetera etcetera

7:20 - you weren't using less RAM per say. You changed reserved VRAM to 4gb, thus prioritising it. This way the 16gb of all the ram you have in steam deck got allocated differently. But you weren't using less of it. Most probably very similar amount, but in different place. It debatable where it is more important.

How can I remove the information tab of the fps, the temp and those things that appear when you are in the game?

If this solves the memory leak issue I’ve been having with God of War, sign me right up! Lol

Hi, thanks for this utility!! I have a question, do you know why a steam deck is not waking up from sleep??

If i did it, it is saved? Or every time i starting the deck must do it? Second question: Must have to play in desktop mode or cryoutility works as a gaming mode? (big screen)

Is 16GB Ram not enough? why do we need to increase the VRAM?

Waiting for an Asus ROG Ally video 😁

if his name is Kyle, he is right.

Would you recommend this on bazzite? Using a dual boot ROG Ally X.

Cryobyte33 is awesome !!!

I'd argue that Decky is better for power tools.

Well, I followed it and I got 8gb of swap size instead of the 16 shown in the video. I tried using the resize option and the maximum value for me is still 8. Any advice? Is the swap memory crucial for this slight performance boost?

The Sync Game Data option is a mystery. I select the source and target drives, then I just get a cancel and close button. How does it work?

FYI, RDR2 is one of the few games that runs better with a UMA size of 1GB! There’s frame drops near water if you put it on 4GB!

Do star wars the old republic 1+2 work with yuzu (: thanks for the video. was very useful

Great vid! My question would be, does this now constantly run in the background? And does it help to save battery even when in menus and not playing games/Desktop mode? I have a game called The Getaway on PS2 and it hasn’t fixed the issues for this particular game. Does anyone know what I should change, maybe in Power Tools for this to work smoothly? Getting a lot of laggy sound, cutscenes and random black and white sections of the game 😢

Be very careful with this. It absolutely works, but after a week of using it, it bricked my steam deck.

I'm trying to find out how well the deck does for ps2 emulation, can't find any videos recently with recent deck improvements, what % of the games will it run just fine, and same for OG Xbox, can anyone point in a direction?

I was able to install CryoUtilities thanks to your guide. However, I still have the same issue with Metroid Prime Remaster. The framerate drops to 30 during gameplay DOCKED and Handheld which makes everything move very slow and unplayable. Texture pixels shows up frequently all over the game. Is there is a specific setting that I need to adjust for this game in the Yuzu Emulator?