Thanks to the community and CryoByte33 we have some awesome performance fixes for your Steam Deck that are completely free and incredibly quick to implement.
First and foremost, the biggest part of these changes are from CryoByte33's CryoUtilites that just got updated to 2.0 with a swish new UI and some extra functionality added. Be sure to check out his YouTube for a more in-depth Technical analysis of the changes he has added.
You can get the new CryoUtilites 2.0 app here
You will need a SUDO password to run the app, if you don't know what that is, because you either forgot it or you never set one, follow our guide here to sort that out
We recommend you just hit the Recommended Settings button and let it do it's thing, this could take up to 30 minutes if you have an older Steam OS version or TRIM has never been run, but this will set:
Swap File to 16 GB
Set VM Swappiness to 1
Enable Huge Pages (THP)
Enable Shared Memory for Huge Pages
Enable Compaction Proactiveness
Fix Page Lock Unfairness
You can manually toggle each of these options, but with the amount of research Cryobyte33 has done on these topics, these are good to have on.
The Storage options on Cryoutilities do not run automatically but you can choose to do these if you want.
Sync Game Data
Sometimes game files can end up on both your Internal drive and SD card, this causes reads and writes for games across multiple drives which can be inefficient, synching the files keeps them all on the same Drive
Delete Stale Game Data
Another feature that was added allows you to manage your Prefixes and Shader cache for all the games and identifies if they are still installed or not, it's safe to delete all of these if you want to save space and they will be re-downloaded the next time you play.
We recommend that you only delete the cache for the games you no longer have installed to save time later.
CryoUtilites doesn't delete old game data though, if you want to identify and clear out any of those files, you will need to use our other guide here
Along with all the other fixes above, we highly recommend increasing the UMA Frame buffer as well.
You can find our full guide on how to do this here