Steam has changed the way it monitors system performance
Steam’s new performance monitoring tools deliver “actual game frame rate” detection
Value has just released a new Steam Client update, making the company’s new In-Game Performance Overlay available to all users. Previously, this update was only available to Steam Beta users. This update adds new performance monitoring tools that gamers can utilise, adding features like “actual game frame rate” detection, and higher levels of detail.
Users can choose to see a single FPS value, more FPS details, FPS details + CPU and GPU utilisation, and FPS details with CPU/GPU utilisation and full memory/RAM details. With full FPS information, Steam can now showcase your “actual game frame rate” alongside full framerates that account for frames generated using DLSS, FSR, or XeSS.
Levels of detail
The new performance monitor gives you four levels of detail: Single FPS Value, FPS Details, FPS Details, CPU & GPU Utilization, and FPS, CPU, GPU & RAM Full Details.
You can keep the display small with a single FPS value, or you can expand to the full details when debugging a performance issue. These details can be adjusted live in-game. You can also adjust color saturation, text size, and background opacity to make this as prominent (as seen below), or as subtle and fading into the background of the game as you’d like. You can optionally show a graph of FPS over time, and you can optionally show a graph of CPU utilization per-core.
– Valve
Users can activate Steam’s new In-Game Performance Monitors using the Steam Settings menu. These options are available in the “In Game” portion of Steam’s options menu. Note that users can scale the text size of their FPS counters and adjust their contrast/saturation. Framerate graphing tools are also available.
How to enable
To enable the new performance overlay, adjust it’s size and position, set a hot-key, and more, go to Settings->In Game and find the new Performance Overlay section as pictured below.
– Valve
In the future, Valve plans to enhance its monitoring tools with additional data, enabling gamers to gain a deeper understanding of their games and system performance. This will allow users to detect “common bad hardware performance scenarios.” These tools will give gamers a “larger summary” of their game performance. Valve also plans to broaden its hardware/software support, allowing more users to benefit from Valve’s tools.
What’s next?
Today’s update is a first step towards helping Steam users more easily understand their game and system performance. We have plans to add some additional pieces of data to the performance overlay going forward, to detect certain common bad hardware performance scenarios, and to show a larger summary of your games performance in the overlay itself when you hit shift-tab.
This first version also focuses on Windows users and on the most common GPU hardware. If you are on a non-Windows platform, or on an uncommon or older GPU, you may not see the full set of data today.
– Valve
You can join the discussion on Steam’s new In-Game Performance Monitor on the OC3D Forums.
