FSR 4 has been in development for 9-12 months already, and one of the biggest focuses is improving battery life for handhelds

the idea of it improving battery is that generating frames is less performance intensive than running a certain framerate (e.g 60 fps capped game with frame gen at double the framerate consumes less power than running the same game at 120 fps). though its slightly less practical because frame generation only makes sense when the base framerate is high enough (ideally above 60) to avoid a lot of screen artifacting. So in practical use, this only makes sense to "save battery" in the context that you have a 120hz+ screen and choose to cap framerate to 60-75fps.

If one is serious about minmaxing battery to performance in a realistic value, people should have the screen cap at 40 hz, as it has half of the input latency between 30 and 60 fps, but only requires 10 more fps than 30 which is a very realistic performance target for maintaining a minimum on handheld.

I'm reasonably excited. I like the steam deck, and I'm off the opinion that we don't need an updated version just yet. A slower moving target for developers is best for long term game compatibility.

But eventually a new steam deck will arrive, and it will likely use the latest CPU/GPU, which will likely benefit from this new frame generation technology.

And perhaps some benefits will trickle down to the current steam deck, or maybe not 🤷‍♂️

But still, I'm optimistic for the future of mobile gaming.