Steam Now Shows How Fast Games Actually Run on Steam Deck

Open a game’s Steam page and click Learn more in its Steam Deck Compatibility box. There’s a new line at the bottom: the average framerate players get on a Deck. Valve switched it on November 9, using data from players who agreed to share it. Thousands of games have a number already. The Verified badge could tell you a game performs well. Now you get the number.

What did Valve add to the Steam store?

A number and a chart. Under the game’s Deck rating, a line now reads something like “Players on Steam Deck OLED averaged 87 FPS while playing this title.” The date it was last updated sits underneath. Open it and you get two tabs, one for the Deck OLED and one for the LCD. Each has a chart Valve calls the framerate distribution.

The chart is worth the extra click. It shows what share of Valve’s samples landed at each framerate. A game that holds steady is one tall bar. Small bars down at the low end are hitches and stutters, Valve says. The average alone hides those.

Where does the data come from?

From Deck owners who agreed to share it. If Steam has asked you about anonymous framerate data, that’s this. What you send isn’t linked to your Steam account, it’s just tagged with the kind of hardware you’re playing on. The option first showed up in a Steam client beta back in February, and Valve says most Deck players have said yes. So these averages come from a big pool.

Changed your mind? It’s under Steam Account Settings > Data & Browsing > Anonymous Game Framerate Data. A game also needs enough players before anything shows up, because Valve waits for a minimum number of data points. So a small indie game may stay blank for a while.

How should you read the number?

As what a typical Deck gets with the frame limit left alone. Valve only counts Decks at the default limit, 60 FPS on the LCD and 90 on the OLED. So an LCD number tops out at 60. That’s by design. It doesn’t track in-game settings either, though Valve says the numbers still bunch up in fairly narrow ranges.

The odd one is a chart split between 90 and 45, with nothing in between. That’s VSync on the OLED’s 90Hz screen. When a game can’t hold 90, it drops to 45 for a frame and climbs back. A game running at 75 shows up as a mix of the two. Games that cap themselves at 60 show the same 90 and 45 split on an OLED.

For a sense of scale, my LCD Steam Deck averaged 30 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 on Medium. That’s from when I tested it against three other handhelds for my September benchmarks. One preset, one power setting. Steam’s figure blends whatever its players chose. That’s closer to picking the game up and playing.

Why isn’t the Verified badge enough?

Because a rating can’t tell you how smooth is smooth enough. Valve says so itself. Verified is based on standard test criteria that “may not match every customer’s bar for acceptable gameplay.” A Verified game might sit below the framerate you like. A game marked Unsupported for shaky performance might be fine by you. The average fills that gap.

Developers got this first. Makers of Verified games have seen their Deck averages in Steamworks, Valve’s dashboard for developers, since April. By late October, makers of Playable and Unsupported games could see theirs too. Now it’s your turn.

Is this coming to PC?

Eventually, maybe. Valve calls this a stepping stone toward framerate data for more devices. The desktop Steam client now asks for the same opt-in. It’s only in the beta for now, and Valve says it’ll reach everyone later. There’s no word on when PC numbers will show up on store pages. Or how Valve would show them across so many different PCs. It started with the Deck because every Deck has the same hardware, which makes the data easier to read.