Steam May Get Crowd-Sourced FPS Prediction Based On Similar PC Hardware

If you use Steam consistently you'll likely have noticed that many reviews now include the user's system specs thanks to a new checkbox you can check when you're adding a review for a game. You may also have seen a pop-up dialog recently where Steam was asking you if it can track your performance data in games. If you said "yes," your data may soon be used to help buyers understand how well their PC will play a given game before they buy it.


This news comes from the ResetEra forums, where user dex3108 dug into the latest Steam client update and found some strings that suggest Valve is building a tool for exactly the purpose of helping gamers tell which games will run well on their systems. The strings say things like "Framerate Estimator" and "Select an App and a PC config to get a chart of estimated framerates, based on the framerates of other Steam users." Pretty straightforward.


A Reddit post describing the feature, simply titled "Great feature incoming," hit over 48,000 upvotes over the holiday weekend. Many users in the thread are excited about the potential, comparing the feature to the website "Can You Run It?," which tracks game system requirements and offers useful comparisons against those. This Steam data could, in theory, be a lot more useful because it's based off of real users' experiences running the game, not vague system requirements posted by the developer.


We do have a lot of questions about the feature, though. Is Valve going to be tracking game settings? Cyberpunk 2077, as an example, can run between 300 FPS and 3 FPS on the same hardware, even at the same resolution. What about CPU versus GPU bottlenecks? To say nothing of those with poorly configured, overheating, or simply underclocked or overclocked systems. All of these factors could skew the data.

Of course, one way to deal with skewed data is to simply collect more data. There are 35 million Steam users online right now, and even that is fraction of the total player base. It's quite possible Valve is simply going to track the frame rates players get while actually playing the game, assuming that they will have adjusted the game for decent performance on their hardware. That makes the data less useful than it could be, as players can't say something like "could I play this on max settings," but it's still more useful than no data at all.