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| 1 | +[h1]Understanding the In-Game Overlay Performance Monitor[/h1] |
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| 3 | +Steam's in-game overlay can render a performance monitor in one corner of your screen while you are playing a game. This feature is designed to help you understand how you game is running, what type of load the game is putting your system under, and whether your hardware is performing as you'd expect it to. The performance monitor shows you detailed FPS (frame rate) performance information, CPU performance information, GPU performance information, and System RAM information. This FAQ focuses on the full set of metrics initially available on Windows PCs, but much of it will apply to other supported operating systems and while some metrics are not supported on other operating systems additional support is planned for later. |
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| 5 | +The performance monitor can help you understand your frame rate (both including frame generation, and base game frame rate), and it can help you see if CPU utilization might be your bottleneck, or if your GPU is. You can see if you are out of system or video memory and if those factors are impacting performance as well. The performance monitor looks something like the below at full detail (detail levels, screen position, contrast/saturation, and background opacity are adjustable in Settings->In Game). |
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| 7 | +[img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/39983882/744844f333555af1f1a9b07e766747e1d64e3351.png[/img] |
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| 9 | +To enable the performance monitor, go to Settings->In Game, and find the Performance Monitor settings and detail level options. |
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| 11 | +Let's dive into the detailed meaning of each section that might be displayed depending on your detail level below. |
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| 13 | +[h2]FPS + DLSS/FSR Frame Generation[/h2] |
| 14 | + |
| 15 | +FPS means frames per second, and is a common gaming performance metric. It represents how many times the game can run, update it's world simulation, process input, generate a new back buffer image, and present it to the monitor. Most gamers are used to thinking of FPS as a single number and have some rule in their head like 60 FPS feels smooth, anything 30-60 might be passable but is less good, and anything below 30 is really bad. Competitive gamers might up their target to 120 or higher for ultra low latency and smooth response times. However, on today's modern systems framerate has been complicated by the introduction of frame generation technology like DLSS and FSR. If a user has a capable GPU and has frame generation turned on then most software will see the FPS number as including the generated frames. This is correct if you think about just the smoothness of the video and how frequently the monitor is updated. However, this is incorrect if you care about actual game frames, which do other work like process input, handle network updates, perform collision detection for models and projectiles, etc. Frame generation can't help with things like input latency that matter to competitive gamers, but it can make things look visually smoother on todays high refresh rate monitors. |
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| 17 | +The Steam Performance monitor will detect frame generation technology and break down both the DLSS/FSR Frame Gen including FPS and the actual game FPS over 1 second intervals. Further, the overlay will show the minimum and maximum single game frame performance within those one second intervals. If you see a single FPS XX number plus the ↓Max↑Min, then your game is not actively using frame generation. If you see a DLSS/FSR/FG number followed by FPS XX ↓Min↑Max, then your game is using frame generation actively and you get both that display frame rate including generated frames and the actual game frame rate. Note that frame generation enabled games will commonly switch frame generation off in menus and cutscenes and that this is normal and correct behavior to see. |
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| 19 | +[b]A note on micro stutter: [/b] Users sometimes experience a solid average frame time, say 60-70 FPS, but will complain a game feels bad and that the frame rate drops now and then even though the FPS Avg doesn't reflect it. At Valve we refer to this as micro stutter. What happens, is that even if your game frequently runs at a solid 70 FPS, one single long frame that takes much more time than others can cause a visible stutter or input latency that you notice. We have given you the ↓Min number to represent this, the value is what your frame rate would have been in the second if every single frame was as slow as the worst frame that second. Some other software will show you actual frame times in milliseconds, but we have chosen to convert into FPS to keep the AVG/MIN/MAX in comparable and familiar units. If you see the ↓Min number turn red, it means we think it's a meaningful drop, which means less than half the average. |
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| 21 | +[h2]FPS Graph[/h2] |
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| 23 | +It can be hard to look up at the FPS counter in the middle of an important moment of game play, like a boss encounter, but these are often the same moments framerate suffers and you feel a stutter happen. To help, we graph the one second AVG FPS values over a 90 second window in green. Additionally, if there are any ↓Min FPS values we considered possibly bad and showed as red, then we also graph those in red. This graph should be useful to look up at and see how stable your avg is, and if you are getting any micro stutter as well as how frequent it is. The small numbers to the right of the graph tell you what the y-axis range is on the graph, which will adjust over time based on the values in the 90 second window. Remember that an occasional red stutter is a common occurrence when changing levels, transitioning in/out of menus, etc. What you are looking for is smooth during general gameplay, no huge sustained red dips, and no noticeable stutter. You usually can't avoid a few single red minimums here and there. |
| 24 | + |
| 25 | +[h2]CPU Performance Info[/h2] |
| 26 | + |
| 27 | +Measuring CPU performance and utilization has also become more complicated as CPUs become more complex over time. You may be used to some software showing 0-100% CPU utilization numbers that represent the percentage of time the CPU is busy. On modern many core processors, especially "turbo boost" or "precision boost" types of processors, this simple metric has become much less useful. Most games can't utilize all cores fully on many core processors, and some cores may run at higher speeds than others. Windows Task Manager moved to a metric Microsoft calls "% Processor Utility" back in Windows 8, and this is the same metric we use for our CPU % values. Processor Utility aims to measure the amount of work the CPU is doing scaled to it's base clock rate. This is useful because a processor running at 50% speed that is busy 100% of the time is doing much less work than a boosted processor running at 120% of base speed running 100% of the time. Processor Utility numbers allow that difference to be represented. |
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| 29 | +As a result of using the Processor Utility numbers when your CPU boosts above base clock speed you can see values over 100%. The utilization numbers we show look like CPU 25%/↑119%. The first number is the average processor utility across all your cores, we sample this value from Windows once a second. Many times this number will be low simply because you have many cores and the game is only using some of them due to it's architecture. The second number is the processor utility value from the OS for the single core that is most utilized at the time we sampled, this number will commonly be over 100% if you have a processor that boosts above it's base clock speed. |
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| 31 | +The second set of CPU numbers show you exactly how much your processor might be boosting and are speed numbers commonly shown in Ghz. The first number is again the average across all cores, and the ↑Max is the highest core at our every 1 second sampling time. |
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| 33 | +[h2]GPU Performance Info[/h2] |
| 34 | + |
| 35 | +Modern systems may have multiple GPUs, and GPUs have multiple engines (3D, Copy, Video Encode/Decode, etc). GPUs are core to many games performance and are a common bottleneck on your overall game speed. The single GPU 95% percent utilization number we choose to show is found by, iterating GPUs and GPU engines, and finding the most used engine. This will normally be the 3D engine on your primary GPU when in game. This logic matches Windows Task Manager and should be consistent with it. |
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| 37 | +After utilization, you may see GPU temperature if you are on a supported vendors card that we are able to pull temperature from. This is the temperature of the hottest sensor we could query on your GPU. |
| 38 | + |
| 39 | +The final set of GPU numbers represents GPU memory. We show something like 6.8/16 GB. Our numbers are "dedicated video memory" + "shared video memory" / "total dedicated video memory". Shared video memory is memory that was placed in system RAM rather than in dedicated GPU memory. If you are using a CPU integrated GPU, your GPU will not have physically separate memory, but it will have some amount of superficially dedicated memory it has fast access to and this will show up as dedicated memory. If you see the first number larger than the second, we will color it red as a warning, and you are out of dedicated GPU memory. It's possible some other application other than the game is using a bunch of GPU memory, and you may want to close it. If all the memory comes from the game, the game at it's current graphics settings needs more video memory than you have and performance is likely to suffer. |
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| 41 | +[h2]RAM Info[/h2] |
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| 43 | +This section shows you the currently used amount of your physical system memory vs the total your system has. This memory is separate from any discrete physical GPU memory, but some of it may be shared with the GPU if the GPU runs out of dedicated memory or you are using an integrated GPU. |
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| 45 | +The important thing about RAM is that if you are out of memory, the OS will have to swap some memory contents out of fast system RAM and onto slower disk based swap space. That will cause a big drop in CPU performance as it spends time blocked on moving data in between RAM and disk storage. If you have plenty of free system ram, then you can ignore these numbers, but if you near your maximum, you may need to close other applications, or to improve game performance you may need more system RAM. |
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