- The latest Steam update adds a new benefit monitoring feature
- Overlay can display FPS values, monitor CPU and GPU usage and more
- Valve says the overlay is designed to help players understand how their PC works and how it affects their game’s performance
Valve has released a new Steam client update that lets players easily monitor the performance of their games.
As explained in a new blog post, this update adds a performance monitoring overlay and is “designed to help you understand how your PC works and how it affects your gaming performance.”
Unlike the previous frames per Second (FPS) counts that can be changed to appear in the corner of a game, this new feature will monitor image speed values, but also break generated frames from Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) or FIDELITEFX Super Resolution (FSR) VS In-Game FPS.
There are four levels of monitoring with this overlay, including single FPS value, FPS details, FPS details, CPU & GPU use and FPS, CPU, GPU and RAM.
“It can show you my/max single frame values and a graph of image velocity over time,” Valve explained. “In addition, it will show you CPU performance information, GPU performance information and memory memory usage information. This data may be useful for understanding the causes of poor gaming performance, whether it is a slow CPU, GPU or too high graphics settings that are over to subscribe to your video or system RAM.”
Once enabled, the overlay appears at the bottom of the screen, but the players can keep the display small with a single FPS value or expand it to show the full details when they fail a benefit problem.
Players can freely adjust details live in the game, change color saturation, text size and background opacity to their taste, show a graph over FPS over time and a graph of CPU utilization per-core.
To activate the new performance overlay, users need to go to Settings> in play and scroll down to the new Performance overlay section. There they can change the position of the overlay, make a hotkey for easier access and more.
Valve also said it plans to add additional pieces of data to the performance overlay, “to detect certain ordinary bad hardware performance scenarios and to show a larger summary of your gaming performance in the overlay itself when you hit change loss.”
