Valve has been steadily revamping its Steam client for years now, with major updates hitting the PC store and platform targeting various parts. The next target has been revealed to be the very popular performance monitor that's a part of the Steam overlay. While the current version only shows a number in a small area to count the current frame rate of the game that's running, the update is giving much more information to the user.
Now available via the Steam Beta client, the performance monitor now has multiple detail levels to choose from. These are FPS Single Value (the original version), FPS Detail & Graph, FPS Detail CPU & GPU Utilization, as well as the behemoth FPS Detail & Graph, CPU, GPU, & RAM Details options. As expected, each option adds more and more information to what's shown to the user on the overlay.
Screen position, contrast and saturation, as well as background opacity, can also be adjusted from the same overlay settings page.
The image above shows the maximum detail option available for users, with everything from generated frames to helpful graphs and VRAM information being shown while playing a game.
"The performance monitor can help you understand your frame rate (both including frame generation, and base game frame rate), and it can help you see if CPU utilization might be your bottleneck, or if your GPU is," says Valve regarding its latest upgrade. "You can see if you are out of system or video memory and if those factors are impacting performance as well."
Valve said that some of these features, in this initial beta release, will only be available on Windows machines, at least for now. "Much of it will apply to other supported operating systems and while some metrics are not supported on other operating systems additional support is planned for later," added the company.
Check out this handy FAQ set up by Valve that explains what each setting means as well as notes on what issues players can diagnose, like micro stutter or bottlenecks, using these overlay additions.
To try out the new feature before it goes out to everyone, you can switch to the Steam Beta Client by heading to the app's Settings > Interface section and changing the Client Beta Participation dropdown to the latest version available. Following that, to enable the new performance monitor, go to Settings > In Game section, and change the detail level to the level you would like.
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