Steam’s new performance monitor beats Task Manager, says Valve

Not all PC gamers are obsessed with hardware and performance… which is kind of like saying not all Porsches are fast. If you’ve dropped four figures into a machine specifically to play games, you probably want to quantify at least some of that performance. The latest Steam beta has improved its in-game overlay performance monitor, and according to Valve, it’s even better than the one in Windows.

Well, the part that monitors your graphics card, anyway. In the notes for the latest Steam beta release, Valve says it uses a new method to compute GPU utilization—one that’s been optimized to more accurately reflect changes when other processes beyond the game you’re playing utilize the GPU. (More common now as browsers and apps are optimized for more powerful graphics cards, including integrated graphics.)

As PC Gamer notes, the tool will sometimes report higher GPU utilization than the built-in monitor in Windows Task Manager, which Valve claims “appears to also under report in similar situations to our prior implementation.” Granted, unless you really know your computer science, you’ll have to take Valve’s word and trust that its implementation is interested in showing you data that’s fully optimized for gamers.

Other changes in the beta include various bug fixes and wider format Steam game store pages that should look better on bigger monitors. Exactly when these changes will make it to the wider Steam release wasn’t shared, so presumably they need a bit more testing.