Valve already collects a lot of data about your gaming PC, typically to release its hardware survey every month. But it looks like Steam will soon use frame rate data gathered by its millions of users to estimate how well a game will actually run on your rig.
This all started about a month ago, when a SteamOS beta started collecting performance information. But now, a user on ResetEra (via PC Gamer) has spotted a string in the latest Steam update that would use that data to estimate how well the game will run on your hardware. It does not seem like this performance estimate is visible on any actual game pages quite yet, but Steam wouldn’t be the first digital PC games store to give its users this kind of estimate.
Love it or hate it, the Xbox app, and the Windows Store before it, has been giving estimates on game performance for years now, even though the actual information it gives you is… thin to say the least. This is why when you click on a game in Game Pass, you’ll get a “Should perform great on your device” message at the top of the page.
It seems like the Steam performance estimate will be much more detailed, though. From the code string found on ResetEra, it looks like you’ll be able to enter a CPU, a GPU, and an amount of RAM to get a rough estimate of what your performance should look like. Or, if you’re using Steam on your gaming PC like most people do, you’ll be able to just see the projected performance based on whatever hardware you’re already using. After all, Valve has been collecting users’ hardware configuration data for years now.
What this frame rate estimate would be particularly useful for is the Steam Machine and other Valve hardware. Assuming the Steam Machine sells well, Valve will have thousands of nearly identical hardware configurations to gather performance information from, which will really help boost the accuracy of its estimates.
I’ve seen plenty of people in our comments nervous about the Radeon RX 7600M-level GPU in the mini gaming PC, but with this performance information living on the store page for every game, you’ll just be able to know how well the Steam Machine will handle pretty much any game.
Steam’s frame rate data harvesting is still only in the beta client, so it’ll be a while before this feature is available or widespread. Once it is live, though, it should help plenty of people decide whether or not their hardware is actually powerful enough to run that new game.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
