There are a few questions every PC gamer has asked before buying a game on Steam. Will it run well on my computer? What kind of frame rate can I expect? Those doubts tend to show up especially when you’re using a low-to-mid-range PC, and in most cases the easiest thing to do is check the minimum and recommended requirements. The problem is that those specs are often incomplete, because they leave out the details that actually matter, such as resolution, framerate targets, or whether upscaling is part of the equation.
Minimum and recommended requirements are ultimately just a rough guide, and not a particularly reliable one if you want to know whether your PC will run a game smoothly and at exactly what level of performance. In that sense, Valve seems to be trying to standardize the relationship between games and expected framerates. A few months ago, we reported that Steam had enabled an option allowing users to display their PC specs when writing a review for a game.
The Steam Tool That Could Help Millions of Players
That was already a meaningful improvement, because it gave user reviews more context and more credibility, but it was still only an optional extra. Now, however, it looks like Valve wants to go further with a feature that could help millions of players. According to Tom’s Hardware, Steam has added a new client option that lets users voluntarily share framerate data from the games they play with Valve.
Last month’s patch notes said the following: “When active, Steam will collect gameplay framerate data stored without connection to your Steam account, but identified with the kind of hardware you are playing on.” In other words, Valve will not know that it was specifically you playing, but it will know that a configuration such as an RTX 4070 paired with a certain processor runs a specific game at a certain number of frames per second. All signs suggest this is the feature Valve is preparing to turn into a more visible Steam tool in the future.
Right now, the feature is still in beta, and the current focus is on “devices running SteamOS”, which includes the Steam Deck, the Legion Go S, and other handheld, console-like PCs compatible with Valve’s Linux-based operating system. Put simply, Valve’s medium-term goal seems to be the anonymous collection of framerate data from millions of gameplay sessions, tying those results to specific hardware setups – CPU, GPU, and RAM – so that Steam can estimate how many FPS a game will deliver on a PC similar to yours before you buy it.
That said, in this first beta phase data collection is still limited to SteamOS devices, meaning the systems mentioned above, and possibly in a few months the upcoming Steam Machine, which is expected to arrive in 2026. The reason for concentrating on SteamOS is technical, and from Valve’s point of view it makes perfect sense, because identical hardware and a controlled in-house operating system make performance metrics much more reliable and much easier to compare.
On a Windows PC, by contrast, the number of variables is almost endless, and the results can never be quite as clean. Drivers, background processes, power settings, and many other factors can all influence performance, which means the same parts can behave a little differently across several machines. For now, then, this experiment seems to be limited to SteamOS, which should help Valve build the database it needs before extending the feature to the broader desktop side of Steam.
NotebookCheck has also reported on findings from users on ResetEra, who discovered code inside the Steam client suggesting that these statistics may eventually appear directly on game pages as hardware-based performance estimates. First on SteamOS devices, and later on desktop PCs. If this tool works the way it appears to be intended, it could become one of the most useful additions to the Steam store in years, and it may arrive just in time for the Steam Machine launch in 2026.
Forrás: 3DJuegos, Steam, NotebookCheck
