Steam's new in-game performance monitor is now available for everyone

A few weeks ago, Valve began testing some new tools for Steam's in-game overlay in a beta test. The features are now available for all Steam users.

You can read my previous coverage to learn more about the tools. When the overlay was in beta, it was a little buggy in that it had caused games to slow down. It's not clear whether that the issue  impacted all games. Valve had released an update to address an issue related to D3D11 games, which had caused frame drops. While it had initially only supported some graphics cards, the performance monitor now also works with AMD GPUs, but only recent-ish ones. A Valve employee says that the data requires AMDs ADLX library, which not all GPUs may support. The overlay also works with non-Steam games that you add manually.

Note: For those of you who had opted into the Steam beta channel to try out the performance monitor, you can go back to the stable version of the desktop app. To do so, open Steam > Settings > Interface > Client Beta Participation - set it to "No beta chosen".

You can customize the in-game overlay from Steam > Settings > In Game. This allows you to toggle the performance monitor, set its on-screen position, configure hotkeys, and also customize the kind of information you want to see on the overlay. Valve has added a couple of new options including toggles for show FPS Avg/Min graph, show CPU utilization per core graph. You can also customize the text size scaling, text contrast/saturation and the background opacity of the overlay.

The new overlay is fully compatible with Windows devices, but non-Windows systems, i.e. Linux and macOS may not have access to all the data yet.

Valve is also testing some accessibility options in Steam, but they are still in beta.

Do you like the new features?