TL; DR: VRR not really working but I thought it was supposed to now. What do?

Long Version Below:

I’m a total PC newbie so I don’t really know much about much, but I was reading last year when I got my Steam Deck that VRR would be coming with 3.5 and it is my understanding that VRR is a helpful tool for improving frames-per-second performance so I made sure to buy an external monitor with FreeSync and I even got the official dock to make sure everything would be ready to go when the time came.

Well the time is now and it’s been difficult to get working. At first the VRR option was grayed out and the fine print near the option said the monitor wasn’t VRR capable so I reset the Deck and a dock firmware update showed up so I did that and then the toggle was available. Yay! But it’s been temperamental and it’s hard to know if it’s even working.

I’m currently playing Psychonauts 2 and so I’ve been messing with a lot of settings to see if it’s working but things haven’t been going well. First off the FPS in the game scope overlay is hovering around 30ish no matter where I move the frame slider and/or whether I turn on or off vsync and max frame limit settings in game. I even went into the Steam Deck settings and disabled the single slider option and changed a bunch of options that way, but it’s still the same. The monitor is set to a refresh rate of 160 Hz so that’s odd to me. Then after a while of doing this the monitor would go black and not display the game. And this seems to be increasing in frequency now.

I did multiple restarts throughout this process and went into desktop mode to look at settings and the Deck and dock seemed to really have trouble keeping the settings all saved between restarts. For instance, I would disable the Deck screen in desktop mode and set the external monitor as primary and then after a restart the Deck would think the Deck screen should be primary again in desktop mode.

And now the VRR toggle is back to being grayed out (although you can see that it’s toggled now. But just grayed out so that you couldn’t toggle and untoggle it). I imagine a restart could potentially bring the toggle back but obviously something is wrong and all of this is still not working as intended.

Is it possible that Valve is still working out some kinks with VRR and it will be running smoothly with a future 3.5 update? Am I doing something wrong altogether? Is anyone else experiencing this?

Thanks all. I realize I need more info on the topic so any insight is appreciated.