How useful would a "Max Machine" search on Steam be?

[Zed Clampet]

For instance, Valve takes the recommended specs, does a bit of algorithm magic, and puts out only the games that meet your system's hardware?

@neogunhero I haven't kept up with the hardware threads lately, but I assume you are getting ready to buy the new 9600 XT gpu, but would this be something that would have been helpful to you?

The biggest challenge I see would be that you would have to have further methods of cutting down the games that you get shown, like tags, etc.

 

[Colif]

You need some filters for sure to remove all the games that easily pass it but aren't really wanted. I assume plenty of indie games would run on anything.

I ran Can you run it a few days ago, it was fun for a laugh. I remember running that just after my GPU was released and it didn't know what I had and said I could only run 4 or so games on the listing. Seems I can run anything now.

 

[BeardyHat]

Can't say I'd use it all that much, but maybe that comes from a place of privilege. I know with any given game, I have some machine that will run it or where I feel it would be better played.

Plus sys reqs aren't often a guarantee (much like Deck Verified) that a particular game will run well on that hardware.

 

[neogunhero]

For instance, Valve takes the recommended specs, does a bit of algorithm magic, and puts out only the games that meet your system's hardware?

@neogunhero I haven't kept up with the hardware threads lately, but I assume you are getting ready to buy the new 9600 XT gpu, but would this be something that would have been helpful to you?

The biggest challenge I see would be that you would have to have further methods of cutting down the games that you get shown, like tags, etc.

This would be a pretty great tool especially for laptop gamers. Steam already has all the info on your machine's hardware anyways, so it seems like it could be easy to implement. However, it shouldn't rely solely on the developers listed recommended specs, there should be a way to match it against a set of real benchmarks to provide a better guess at if your PC will run it well or not. Also, having different "tiers" to tell you how well it could run, such as sub-30fps, average at 30fps, or hits 60fps could be useful as well. Even though your PC could technically play it, if you knew that a game would run at less than 30FPS, then you may not buy it with that extra bit of info.

 

[Colif]

This would work if every PC was the same... There are so many variables that literally 2 PC with the same parts can still have different performance. So it can't be 100% accurate, best they can say is it should work...

With so many games on Steam now, the process of checking every game against different machines is something that should have existed long before now. True, no reason to not start now but there is a large black hole there.

The steam app could perhaps help with usage stats. Settings most used. Something like Steamdb could aggregate the results. It really depends what Valve are willing to share.

There are privacy concerns, if its not part of the User agreement now, they may not be able to share it. Probably why they rely on the survey.

 

[Pifanjr]

You'd think that, for the most popular games especially, it could be possible to collect enough user data on how the game runs on different machines to give a prediction on how well any specific machine could run it.

But perhaps it's like Colif said and there are too many variables to give any kind of usable prediction. Or perhaps it's too much effort to collect the data from each game, as I don't think Steam itself has enough information to determine how well the game runs, so it'd have to partner with every developer to get access to that data.

 

[Zloth]

Yeah, it can be hard to tell if a game is running poorly because the user has a whole bunch of mods, or some virus software, or if it's me cranking the graphics up without a care for my FPS. Early in a game's life, new drivers can sometimes be very important, too.

However, if may not be needed if you're willing to make it "iffy." It isn't that hard to throw out outliers getting well under the average framerate. The EULA isn't going to let Steam just gather the data willy-nilly, but they could certainly ask users about providing the information. Just compare to other people on Steam who have played and tell them "here's what performance other folks are getting." Maybe show the crashes per hour, too.

I like it! I won't use it cuz I don't care about performance that much, but I like it!

Oh, but I'm thinking info on the store page, not on searching. It might be possible to do that, too, but it will be even more fuzzy.