Valve added a new performance monitoring tool to Steam which can help you determine why a game is running smoothly or not. According to a postit not only breaks down a game’s frame rate but also tells you how many frames were generated using techniques like Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR.
This change is part of a Steam Client update that’s now available, but Valve notes that the “first version” is aimed at “Windows users and the most common GPU hardware.” Steam had previously provided a simple FPS counter. However, separating the generated frames from those rendered by your graphics cores will help you understand key differences in how a game plays. Valve’s detailed support document on the performance monitor says that frame generation cannot help with input latency, which is important to competitive gamers. However, it can make things appear visually smoother on high refresh rate displays.
This means that you can check whether your game is actually running at 30 frames per second, even though it looks smoother due to the “fake frame” added by AMD and Nvidia. (This is a hot topic in the PC gaming world, and Valve doesn’t seem to be taking sides.) Valve has already given handheld users a taste of this quick insight by building tools such as MangoHud into SteamOS and Steam Deck. These tools let you monitor your GPU, RAM and CPU and carefully ration your battery life. The desktop Steam version will make this information more accessible for many more players.
Valve has plans to add “some additional pieces of data to performance overlay going forward” to detect common bad hardware scenarios and to show a bigger summary of your game’s performance when you hit shift tab.
