Valve Says Its New Steam Overlay Can Help PC Gamers Understand the Causes of Bad Performance

Steam has released a caller in-game show to assistance players recognize the causes of atrocious PC crippled performance.

In a blog post, developer Valve explained that the caller show overlay volition amusement you framerate values, akin to the aged FPS counter, "but it tin besides interruption retired generated frames from DLSS oregon FSR vs existent crippled framerate." That's large timing fixed the caller Steam Summer Sale is live.

"It tin amusement you min/max azygous framework values and a graph of framerate implicit time," Valve continued. "Additionally, it volition amusement you CPU show information, GPU show information, and strategy representation usage information. These pieces of information tin beryllium utile to recognize the causes of atrocious crippled show whether that beryllium a dilatory CPU, GPU, oregon excessively precocious graphics settings that are over-subscribing your video oregon strategy RAM."

Here's a screenshot showing each 4 existent options, though enactment you tin lone person 1 of these displaying astatine immoderate 1 clip — we've compiled them present to marque it easier to spot what the antithetic settings — FPS Single Value, FPS Details, FPS Details, CPU & GPU Utilization, and FPS, CPU & Ram Full Details — offer:

An amalgation of each existent show options. Image credit: IGN.

To alteration the caller overlay oregon set its size oregon position, caput to Settings->In Game and find the caller Performance Overlay section.

Valve said this is "a archetypal step" towards helping Steam users much easy recognize their crippled and strategy performance, and we tin expect further pieces of information to beryllium added to the overlay going forward.

Steam, the astir fashionable integer crippled distributor for PC players, erstwhile again broke its ain concurrent idiosyncratic record, breaching 40 cardinal players for the archetypal clip successful March 2025.

Steam has since breached that grounds again logging 41,239,880 simultaneous players, breaking its erstwhile grounds of 40.2 cardinal players acceptable the play before.

And portion that fig includes idle players — that is, players with Steam unfastened but not needfully utilizing it — the fig of users actively successful a crippled has deed a caller record, too, jumping to 13.2 cardinal players.

Valve precocious dismissed reports its Steam level suffered a "major" information hack, confirming determination was "NOT a breach" of Steam systems. Given the prolific emergence successful information breaches and the information that implicit 89 cardinal of america person a Steam account, users had bully crushed to beryllium disquieted astir a imaginable information compromise.

Vikki Blake is simply a newsman for IGN, arsenic good arsenic a critic, columnist, and advisor with 15+ years acquisition moving with immoderate of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's besides a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her astatine BlueSky.