While the Steam Deck has been one of the highlights of this decade in gaming, giving people a capable PC in their hands, it’s not been without its issues. Valve has now improved one issue, simply by displaying framerate data on Steam pages.
The Steam Deck Verified system is widely criticised by more savvy consumers due to its ineffectiveness as a seal of quality. Some games earn a Verified badge, giving consumers a feeling that the game will work well on their device, but upon playing the experience is less than acceptable.
One of these sticking points is performance, especially as the Deck becomes more and more dated alongside technically demanding releases. With the addition of Steam Deck framerate data on game pages, Valve has finally released a solution, of sorts.
Valve uses data from players who have opted in to providing framerate data, and you can switch between data for OLED and LCD models.
While the data is currently only being tracked and displayed for Steam Deck (with more and more games being added as data is collected - smaller releases might take longer to display data due to a threshold of users needing to be reached), Valve has stated that the current system is a “stepping stone toward providing framerate data for more devices than just Steam Deck.” That sounds like the Steam Machine to me.
There’s plenty more info on the Steam blog post, including more details on how data is captured and what large gaps in the collected data means.
While this new addition is unlikely to offer everything hardcore users will want (largely due to many of these people heavily tweaking their games to get optimal performance) it’s a great step towards better buying information for the average consumer.
