I can see why Skyrim Special Edition is one of the most played games on Steam deck (2022) It is an absolutely gorgeous game and holds a steady 60 FPS for the most part on high settings.

I recommend that you run this on the high default settings, I did play this on medium as well and there is a bit of a quality difference but there is a huge difference in the battery and wattage percentage so I'll go over that in just a second.

Default High with on high apart from God Ray's quality which is set to medium and 64-bit textures is off by default.

Almost everywhere in the game is 60 FPS even when all hell is breaking loose in battle it does hold an extremely flat frame time graph.

Inside a lot of the time our wattage is only around 15 watts which means we will be getting up to three hours of battery life depending on how much time you spend outside because as you go through some of the towns and with lots of foliage and some long-distance rendering it does put that wattage up to between 25 and 28 and we see these frames drop down into the 50s just slightly and temporarily.

You are going to get a good two hours at least on the battery life even on these high settings now if you did want to drop it down to the medium settings then you will get that 60 FPS permanently and will extend your battery life up to around three hours so depending on how often and how long you're going to play your sessions here and how far away from power I would still recommend keeping this on the default high and enjoying your playthrough.