Valve has added a new performance monitor for Steam, which can help you understand why the game may or may not run smoothly. According to one article, it not only destroys the overall frame rate of the game, it can also tell you how many of these frames are generated by technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD FSR.
The change is part of an update to the now available Steam client, although Valve noted that this “first version” focuses on “Windows users and the most common GPU hardware”.
The company says the new Performance Monitor currently offers up to four different levels of details: single FPS value, FPS details, CPU and GPU utilization, and “FPS, CPU, GPU and RAM details.” The more you choose to display, the more screens will be adopted by the performance monitor.
Steam previously provided a simple FPS counter, but separating the generated frame from the fully rendered frame of the graphics core can help you better understand the key differences between what you see and the feel of the game. “The generation of frameworks can do nothing, such as input latency important for competing gamers, but it can make today’s high refresh rate monitors look much smoother visually,” Valve said in a detailed support document on performance monitors.
In practice, this should mean you can see if your game feels like it’s running at 30 fps, because it’s actually running at 30 fps inside the game engine, even if you see visually smoother images due to “fake frames” added by NVIDIA and AMD. (This is the whole debate in the PC gaming community, and it seems Valve is not the same here.)
Valve has already made handheld gamers aware of these quick insights by building tools like Mangohud (such as Mangohud) into Steam Deck and Steamos, which also allows you to monitor your CPU, graphics, RAM, and carefully evaluate battery life. However, the built-in method in desktop steam can make it easier for more gamers to gain insights.
Valve said it plans to “add some additional data in the performance overlay to detect some common bad hardware performance schemes and show a larger summary in the overlay itself when hitting Shift-Tab.”
