Valve Launches New Steam Overlay for Gaming Performance Data

Steam has introduced a new in-game performance monitor designed to help players identify the root causes of poor PC gaming performance.

In a recent blog post, developer Valve detailed that this new performance overlay displays framerate data, similar to the traditional FPS counter, but with a key enhancement: it can differentiate frames generated by upscaling technologies like DLSS or FSR from the actual game framerate. This launch is well-timed, coinciding with the ongoing Steam Summer Sale.

"The overlay displays minimum and maximum single-frame values alongside a frametime graph," Valve explained. "It also provides CPU and GPU performance metrics, as well as system memory usage. This data is invaluable for diagnosing performance issues, whether they stem from CPU or GPU bottlenecks, or graphics settings that are consuming too much video or system RAM."

The following screenshot showcases all four available overlay options. Please note that only one can be active at a time; we have combined them here for easier comparison of the different settings—FPS Single Value, FPS Details, CPU & GPU Utilization, and FPS, CPU & RAM Full Details:

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

Valve described this update as "a first step" in helping Steam users better understand their system and game performance, with plans to add more data points to the overlay in the future.

Steam, the leading digital game distribution platform for PC, continues to shatter its own concurrent user records. It surpassed 40 million concurrent users for the first time in March 2025.

That record was quickly broken again, with Steam reaching 41,239,880 simultaneous users, exceeding the previous weekend's peak of 40.2 million.

While these figures include users who are idle with the client open, the number of users actively playing a game also reached a new high, climbing to 13.2 million players.

Recently, Valve firmly dismissed claims of a "major" data breach on the Steam platform, stating there was "NOT a breach" of its systems. Given the increasing frequency of data breaches and the fact that over 89 million accounts exist on Steam, users had legitimate concerns about potential security risks.