Valve has decided that Steam Deck owners deserve to know how well their games run and has started publishing real-world frame rates for thousands of titles.
The gaming outfit announced the feature on 9 November and made it available to everyone on 11 November. The figures come from customers who agreed to share anonymous performance information, giving prospective buyers something more useful than a compatibility badge and the optimistic promises of a game’s marketing department.
Until now, Valve’s Steam Deck Verified programme has been a fairly blunt instrument. Games receive Verified, Playable or Unsupported ratings based on whether they meet various technical requirements. However, a game can be considered Verified while running at a frame rate that would make a dedicated PC gamer reach for the sick bag.
Valve admits its testing criteria don’t necessarily match what customers consider acceptable performance. Some players are perfectly happy with 30 frames per second, while others believe anything below 60 is an affront to civilisation. The new system gives customers the actual numbers and leaves them to decide whether a particular game is worth their money.
The information appears on Steam store pages under the Steam Deck Compatibility section. Clicking Learn More reveals the average frame rate recorded by other players, along with a histogram showing how frequently the game runs at different speeds. The data covers games classified as Verified, Playable and Unsupported, provided Valve has collected enough samples.
The histogram is potentially more useful than the average. A game might claim to manage 50 frames per second while regularly falling into the twenties during demanding scenes. By showing the distribution of recorded frame rates, Valve hopes customers can spot performance trouble before discovering it themselves after buying the game.
For example, PC Gamer found that Elden Ring averaged 42 frames per second on the Steam Deck OLED and 38 on the original LCD model. The LCD results showed significant concentrations around 30 and 60 frames per second, suggesting that different players were experiencing quite different performance levels. A single average would have concealed much of that variation.
Valve has attempted to make the figures comparable by excluding samples from systems using non-standard frame-rate limits. The original Steam Deck LCD has a default ceiling of 60 frames per second, while the OLED version reaches 90. Customers who impose lower system limits do not contribute to the published averages, although Valve may still collect their performance data.
Valve does not record which graphics settings players use inside their games, meaning the results combine people running everything at minimum detail with those who have turned up the graphical eye candy. The company claims its measurements generally fall within fairly narrow ranges, but the resulting averages cannot guarantee what an individual customer will experience.
Vertical synchronisation can further complicate the figures. Valve explains that a game struggling to maintain 90 frames per second on an OLED screen might alternate between presenting frames at 90 and 45 frames per second. This can produce an average of 75, even though the game spends no time running at that speed. Apparently, statistics can be just as misleading when computers generate them.
Valve says most Steam Deck owners have opted into its anonymous performance collection programme. The company removes idle periods and invalid samples, collecting multiple readings during individual gaming sessions. Games need to reach a minimum number of samples before their results appear, although Valve has not disclosed the threshold.
The company has been collecting performance information for some time and previously made aggregated figures available to developers. It is now looking beyond its own handheld, with an experimental data-collection option appearing in the Steam desktop client beta. Valve wants to establish whether similar performance reporting could eventually help customers using ordinary gaming PCs.
That ambition presents considerably greater technical headaches. Steam Deck models have broadly standardised hardware, while the average gaming PC can contain almost any combination of processor, graphics card and memory. Comparing their performance would require Valve to identify the relevant configurations and account for differences in graphics settings. For the moment, the company has offered no timetable for releasing comparable figures for other devices.
