For years, Valve’s Steam has been the de-facto storefront for PC players and now it seems it’ll be doing much more including letting you know beforehand just how a particular game will run on your system. First spotted by The Gamer, Steam is currently working on a new feature that’ll function as a “Framerate Estimator” and will display “a chart of estimated framerates, based on the framerates of other Steam users.” The software-based feature will take your overall hardware configuration and by comparing it with the performance of those with similar GPUs and CPUs, deliver a comprehensive insight on how the performance of a title will be on your rig.
Valve also announced last month that it had started to gather framerate data with a new opt-in feature–“Added the option to provide anonymized framerate data,” while adding: “when enabled Steam will collect gameplay framerate data, stored without connection to your Steam account but identified with the kind of hardware you are playing on. This data will help us learn about game compatibility and improve Steam.”
A new post by LambdaGen on Twitter/X has also confirmed that Steam will soon act as sort of a framerate estimator for all your games: “Steam will soon tell you how much FPS you may get according to your PC specs by taking other Steam users with similar hardware.”
And although the feature is currently in Beta, it’ll help provide a rough estimate to all players by utilizing data collected from other gamers who have similar hardware config.
So what all this means is that pretty soon you’ll be able to know how well your rig can run a particular title which will help you know beforehand whether your system needs an upgrade or not. This could be really helpful for lots of players on the platform as it’ll basically eliminate all unfortunate cases of installing a game and then finding out it runs poorly which has no doubt happened to many of us.
