Since Valve announced its Steam Deck Verified program in 2021, players have found that a game’s “Verified” status doesn’t always match how well it actually runs on the handheld. Now, new Steam Deck frame rate data being shared by Valve itself can help players dig deeper into the performance they can expect from many Steam Deck games.

Valve has been collecting anonymized frame rate data from Steam players who opt in since February. Yesterday evening, the company announced it has started sharing that data on many Steam Store pages as averages and histograms for both the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED.

Valve acknowledges that players enabling VSync or frame rate limits can bias the collected data somewhat and that the measurements don’t account for custom in-game settings that Steam Deck users may tinker with to get a game running. Regardless, Valve says it has nonetheless “found that the framerate data consolidates around relatively narrow ranges.”

Beyond the badge

This kind of data can be extremely useful for distinguishing between the wide range of performance levels that can exist among “Verified” Steam Deck games. Both and earn the same Steam Deck Verified badge, for instance, but the former sees average Deck frame rates in the 30–40 FPS range, while the latter usually achieves 50–60 FPS on the hardware.

Valve’s frame rate data is even more useful for games that the company insists are “Unsupported” on Steam Deck because their “graphics setting cannot be configured to run well” on the hardware or because Valve is “still working on adding support for this game.” Despite warnings like these, games like , , and to name just a few, all show extremely playable frame rates reported by actual Steam Deck users. in particular approaches a 60 FPS average on the Steam Deck OLED hardware despite its “Unsupported” status.

Frame rate data can also be useful for judging the single-player modes of games whose multiplayer doesn’t work under SteamOS. , for example, is officially Unsupported on Steam Deck because of anti-cheat compatibility issues, but Steam Deck players report averages of 40+ FPS on the game’s single-player modes.

Of course, collecting and averaging frame rate data for the Steam Deck(s) is made simpler by their set hardware configuration. When it comes to communicating expected frame rates for the wide range of hardware in more generalized gaming PCs, Valve says it is “always looking for new ways to help developers understand the experiences customers are having with their games.”

Back in April, JSON files buried in the Steam client pointed to a potential Steam “Framerate Estimator” tool that could let users “Select an App and a PC config to get a chart of estimated framerates, based on the framerates of other Steam users,” according to strings contained within. That could be incredibly useful for Steam users who want to go beyond the listed Minimum and Recommended hardware requirements without relying on shady-looking third-party FPS-estimator websites. In the meantime, is sharing average frame rate data for the fixed-configuration Steam Machine too much to ask?