Valve have finally clarified what they have been doing with all that collected performance data and all those “Framerate Estimator” text strings: a framerate estimator for the Steam Deck. Or, rather, a framerate average, as games on the Steam Store are now getting attached graphs—under their existing Steam Deck Compatibility details—that show how many frames per second a game has been recording on real players’ handhelds, both the OLED and original LCD models.
The thinking, as Valve explain in a Steam post, is to set more precise performance expectations than the existing verification ratings—Verified, Playable, and Unsupported—provide. This may induce some gentle learned nodding, if you have ever tried an Unsupported game only to find it works more or less fine, or have ever wondered why a game that can just barely scrape together 30fps gets the same green good-job sticker as something that screams along at 90fps. Now, when checking that rating, you will also get a relatively specific idea of smoothness and/or chugging potential.
Or will you? By Valve’s own admission, the displayed results may be skewed by V-Sync treachery, where this anti-screen tear setting (which many games enable by default) could force games into briefly running at unrepresentative framerates. The scoundrel. My current handheld game beau, Mortal Shell II, looks like it may be falling victim to this: its results for the LCD Steam Deck show it mostly runs around 30fps, which is in line with my experience, but the OLED results show it averaging around 45fps. The Steam Deck OLED’s APU is a tiny bit quicker than the LCD Deck’s, but it is not that much of an upgrade.
Image credit: Valve
Image credit: Valve
There’s work to be done, then, though I do appreciate the concept. As tightly as I cling to my battery-efficient, mercifully Windows-free Deck OLED in the face of drastically more powerful handhelds, with every year it becomes a little less likely that new games will comfortably run on it. Verification ratings can still act as decent (if broad) guidelines, but even with V-Sync putting an immaculately untorn thumb on the scales, game-specific framerate data will be much more illustrative.
As for whether these histograms will also get Steam Machine versions, or perhaps cover non-Valve handhelds, Valve say this: “We see this update as a stepping stone toward providing framerate data for more devices than just Steam Deck. To this end, we are also prompting customers to opt-in to providing anonymized framerate data in the Steam desktop client. This opt-in is currently only on Steam Client Beta, and will ship to all customers in the future.” So, maybe, if you gizzus yer data.
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