Valve’s latest Steam Client Beta has upped the ante when it comes to GPU monitoring, claiming its in-game overlay now delivers more accurate utilization readings than Windows Task Manager. According to Valve, Task Manager has historically under-reported GPU usage, particularly for games that launch auxiliary processes alongside the main one. Steam’s revamped overlay captures all these processes, trims sampling errors, and aligns its stats more closely with trusted third-party tools like MSI Afterburner.
The reason Task Manager can be inaccurate is that it measures GPU usage on a per-process basis and relies on the GPU driver to report statistics according to the WDDM specification. Games that split work across multiple processes can therefore have portions of their GPU activity missed, and certain workloads can appear less intensive than they actually are. By aggregating usage across all related processes, Steam’s overlay provides a fuller and more precise picture of a game’s GPU demands:
