Steam now shows how many frames are artificially generated in your games

Valve has added a new performance monitor to Steam, helping users better understand why a game may run smoothly or not. Now Steam displays not only the overall frames per second (FPS) but also the number of frames generated using technologies such as Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR. This update is already available for Windows users and is primarily aimed at modern GPU hardware.

The new performance monitor offers up to four levels of detail: from a simple FPS indicator to detailed information about FPS, CPU and GPU usage, as well as comprehensive data on FPS, CPU, GPU, and RAM. The more levels the user selects, the larger portion of the screen the monitor occupies. Previously, Steam only offered a simple FPS counter, but now the separation of artificially created frames from those rendered by the GPU allows for a better understanding of the difference between what you see and how the game feels.

Valve notes that generating additional frames does not reduce input lag, which is important for players in competitive modes, but makes the image smoother on modern high refresh rate monitors. This means that even when displaying 30 FPS, the game can appear smooth due to the additional "fake" frames from Nvidia and AMD. Valve has also integrated similar tools, such as MangoHud, into Steam Deck and SteamOS for monitoring CPU, graphics, memory, and power consumption. Now this feature will also be available for the desktop version of Steam, making it useful for a larger number of players.

In the future, Valve plans to add more data to the performance overlay to help users identify common hardware issues and receive more detailed performance reports by pressing shift-tab.