Valve is releasing an update for Steam on Windows that brings a new performance monitoring overlay to the client, giving you a better understanding of how fast your PC is and how it affects your gameplay.
One of its key features is the display of the number of real frames per second and those generated thanks to DLSS or FSR. In general, the overlay will show the minimum or maximum values for a single frame and a graph of frame rates over time. It will also display information about the performance of the central processor and graphics processor, as well as RAM usage.
As Valve notes, this data can help understand the cause of poor performance in games: a slow CPU or GPU, or graphics settings that are too high, overloading the system's video memory or RAM.
In addition, the new performance monitoring will have four levels of detail, including for those who are only satisfied with the frame rate: "Fps value", "More detailed display of fps", "More detailed display of fps, CPU and GPU usage" and "Full display of fps, CPU, GPU and RAM usage". This will allow you to choose both a compact view, where only one fps value will be displayed, and to get detailed data using all elements of the PC.
In addition, Steam users will be able to customize the overlay by changing the color saturation or transparency of the background so that even when displaying all the data, it does not distract from the game. It will also be possible to enable the display of a graph of frame rate over a certain period of time, and a graph of CPU usage by individual core.
You can enable the new performance monitoring overlay and find all the necessary settings by going to Settings > In-Game > Performance Monitor Overlay. Steam updates are only just starting to roll out to PCs with the most common graphics cards, so the new menu items may not appear immediately.
"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," Valve writes.
Valve has also published a separate page on Steam support, which explains in detail how a particular value shown by the new overlay is calculated.