Valve's Steam Overlay Identifies PC Gaming Performance Issues

Steam has launched a new in-game performance monitor to help players identify the reasons behind poor PC gaming performance.

In a blog post, developer Valve detailed how this new performance overlay not only displays framerate data, similar to the traditional FPS counter, but can also distinguish between frames generated by upscaling technologies like DLSS or FSR and the actual game framerate. The timing is excellent, coinciding with the launch of the new Steam Summer Sale.

"It can display minimum and maximum single-frame values along with a frametime graph," Valve added. "Furthermore, it provides CPU and GPU performance metrics, as well as system memory usage. This data is invaluable for pinpointing the root cause of performance issues, whether it's a CPU or GPU bottleneck, or graphics settings that are demanding too much from your video or system RAM."

Here is a screenshot featuring all four current overlay options. Please note that only one can be active at a time—we've combined them here to illustrate the differences between each setting: FPS Single Value, FPS Details, CPU & GPU Utilization, and the comprehensive FPS, CPU & RAM Full Details view.

To activate the new overlay or modify its size and position, navigate to Settings -> In-Game and locate the new Performance Overlay section.

Valve described this as "a first step" in making it easier for Steam users to analyze their game and system performance, with plans to incorporate additional data points into the overlay in future updates.

Steam, the leading digital distribution platform for PC gamers, recently surpassed another milestone, exceeding 40 million concurrent users for the first time in March 2025.

Following that, the platform set a new record with 41,239,880 simultaneous users, breaking the previous weekend's high of 40.2 million.

Although this figure includes users who are idle—meaning Steam is open but not actively in use—the number of players actively in-game also reached a new peak, climbing to 13.2 million.

Valve has recently refuted claims that its Steam platform experienced a "major" data breach, stating there was "NOT a breach" of Steam's systems. Given the increasing frequency of data breaches and the fact that over 89 million people have Steam accounts, users had legitimate concerns about a potential security incident.