Steam is building a game performance estimator for your PC

How well will a new game perform on your system? It’s a question that’s never far from the minds of PC gamers, and it’s only getting more relevant as hardware upgrades become expensive, shading to unattainable. Now, it looks like Valve is working on a tool that can give you an estimate of how well a game will run on your specific hardware before you buy it from the Steam store.

Code in the latest Steam update includes mention of a “Framerate Estimator,” which Twixxxter posters are interpreting as a tool that scans your local PC hardware and estimates the performance of a game on the store, no local downloads required. Based on the lines of code posted, it seems like the tool is taking your CPU, RAM, and graphics card into account. All the pieces for such a system are already in place—Steam already knows your local hardware and OS, and reports it back to Valve if you’ve enabled it. (That’s what the monthly reports are about.)

The novel part here is presumably a database of games, how well they do on specific combinations, and then reporting that in a visual interface to the user. The official “system requirements” for a game would be a good place to start, but those aren’t always as helpful as they could be.

This would be a huge boon to players who want a little assurance that the games they buy will run well. But it’d be a help for Valve, too. Who knows how many players take advantage of Steam’s rather lenient return policy because of hardware issues? (Well, Valve knows, I guess.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the work going into this system has a lot in common with the Steam Deck Verified program, which is being expanded for the upcoming Steam Machine.

Valve

On the other hand, I’d be hesitant if I were Valve. On the one hand, estimates based on how a game runs on other machines, even with extremely similar hardware, are generally reliable. For example, when I’m scoping out a laptop deal, I’ll head over to YouTube to see tests for popular games on the integrated graphics card.

But there are also notorious pitfalls. Games can have performance issues across Intel and AMD silicon, for example, or encounter a weird bug that never came up during QA testing and suddenly an entire generation of graphics cards is running the game at half speed. The process would be more error-prone than Steam Deck Verified, which only has to test across a handful of configurations. Valve might not want the customer blowback for incorrect “estimates,” no matter how few those users are—remember, Steam has tens of millions of players who log in daily.

It should also be pointed out that Valve wouldn’t be the first to hit PC with this sort of tool, at least technically. The Microsoft Store/Xbox app has performance estimations, though they leave a lot to be desired. For example, on the Microsoft Store listing for Sea of Thieves, my RTX 5070 Ti desktop shows “Should perform great on your device.” But so does my laptop, which has a Snapdragon processor with pretty pokey integrated graphics. “Great” is not a word often associated with the pixel-pumping power of this ultraportable.

Microsoft’s attempt at this kind of system gets a “needs improvement.” I hope Valve can do better, and I hope we see it in Steam soon. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if it stays on the back burner for a long while.