- Steam is upgrading its in-game frame rate counter to be a full overlay
- This will provide a lot more details on what’s going on under the hood with any given game, and your CPU and GPU’s status too
- That includes whether frame generation is being used, exposing situations where it’s been stealthily enabled, hidden in the background
Valve is beefing up Steam’s built-in frame rate counter – which displays the frames per second (FPS) in the game you’re playing – to provide a lot more info, including whether frame generation is being employed.
Frame generation is the tech used to boost FPS by adding in AI-generated extra frames – often called ‘fake frames’ by those who are less keen on the feature – as seen in Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, and Intel’s XeSS.
Notebookcheck.net spotted that Valve has released a new beta of the Steam app where the basic in-game FPS counter has become a full in-game overlay performance monitor. Remember, this is still in beta, so you won’t see it on your Steam client yet, not unless you’re a beta tester.
In addition to a real-time FPS readout, the new overlay provides detailed information on both CPU and GPU performance, including utilization levels, clock speeds, and temperatures, as well as the amount of video RAM being used by the currently running game (system RAM monitoring is also included).
Along with this, Valve has added the ability to display whether DLSS or FSR is active, and whether those technologies are currently using frame generation, as mentioned at the outset.
To begin with, the full feature set will be for Windows PCs only. However, other platforms (SteamOS) will get most of those capabilities, and whatever isn’t in the initial release should be provided for other operating systems at a later date. In a similar vein, some info will only be displayed for PCs with certain pieces of hardware.
Here’s a full explanation of the new overlay as crafted by Valve, which goes into some detail, but let’s clear up a couple of points next, including why detecting frame generation could be very useful, in light of a recent controversy in the world of PC games.
Analysis: Frame blame game
Okay, first of all, what about if you don’t want this heap of new info? When you switch on the overlay, are you just going to get annoyed at all the extra ‘garbage’ (as far as you might be concerned) cluttering up the screen now?
The good news is that you can dispense with the full readout, and adjust the overlay down to a bare minimum if you want – so it shows only the FPS counter (just as things are now). So don’t fret on that score, plus there’ll be customization options like adjusting how see-through the overlay is, and where it’s placed.
Moving on to frame generation: why is having that displayed a big deal? Well, this is interesting timing actually, as there’s been a lot of controversy that’s surfaced this week about a game that switches on frame generation without letting the gamer know.
This is ARK: Survival Ascended, which has AMD’s (FSR) frame generation on by default, something that reportedly happened a while back (when players observed a major boost to FPS after a patch – which would, of course, happen with frame gen, that’s what it does). The thing is, this wasn’t announced in the patch; it was a stealth move in the background, and moreover, there isn’t even an option for frame generation in the graphics settings.
In other words, there’s no way to know it’s enabled, or indeed to turn it off in ARK (it’s only possible to disable using a console command).
So, you might be playing a game, thinking that the frame rate feels a bit unsettled and jerky, despite a high FPS reading, and that’s because frame generation is on when you didn’t even know it. I should note: jerkiness isn’t inherent to frame generation tech, far from it, but in some scenarios, and especially when you’re trying to inflate a lower frame rate – say, 30 FPS – a feeling of choppiness can be a side-effect. This is why ‘fake frames’ can be called out in a negative way, as I mentioned before.
At any rate, in the case of ARK: Survival Ascended, if you popped the new Steam overlay on, you’d immediately see that it has frame generation active. Furthermore, the new overlay will also highlight incidents of micro-stutter where the frame rate plunges temporarily to very low levels, causing jerkiness. (Which can be one of the downsides of using frame generation, again in certain scenarios – don’t write frame generation off due to any of this, by the way, it can be very useful indeed).
As you might have gathered by now, contemporary graphics technologies and understanding frame rates is a complicated business with a lot of nuances. But at least you’ll be armed with more knowledge of what’s going on with the extra details that Steam’s new in-game overlay furnishes you with, assuming you want to get to grips with it all. And if you don’t, just turn it off and have the bare frame rate on-screen.
On a final note, as you may be aware, you can already get this kind of functionality with third-party tools (such as Rivatuner, known as RTSS), but Valve bringing this in for Steam is convenient in terms of having it integrated right there, no extra installation required.
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