Valve working on FPS prediction system for games on Steam

What we’ve all been hoping for for a long time—and something that will help a lot—has finally happened: Valve is planning to add FPS estimates on Steam for games before we even buy them.

That’s right, instead of the typical minimum requirements and recommended specs, which often don’t mean much since they can’t accurately predict performance for every setup, Steam will use real data from other players.

It would work like this: people play the game, Steam collects their performance data and compares it to your PC, and in that way it can accurately estimate whether the game will run at 60 FPS or 5 FPS for you.

The plan is for you to get an FPS estimate, and possibly even a graph, all based on GPU, CPU, RAM, and builds similar to yours.

Right now, the real situation is that when you go to the Store and want to buy a game, you look at the requirements which are often very inaccurate, then you go to YouTube and search something like "RTX 2060 benchmark", and end up wasting a lot of time...
Steam’s new system would solve all of that, instantly telling you how the game will run and whether it will run well or not.

However, there is a problem... all of this is still in BETA, and it’s first coming to SteamOS devices like the Steam Deck.
The reason for that, as mentioned earlier, is that PC has millions of combinations, which is very hard to estimate with precision.

Steam is stepping up to the next level, becoming a smarter store that advises you whether a game is worth buying or not. It’s becoming a system.

If they pull this off right, “buy and hope it runs” will completely disappear. And that’s a game changer for PC gaming.