Steam: Users can attach their hardware to reviews
Anyone writing reviews on Steam can now also attach their hardware specifications. This is intended to help make user tests more informative.
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Valve has been working for several years to make user reviews on Steam more useful. Now, other players' reviews could become technically more informative: Users will have the option to attach their hardware specifications to their reviews.
To do this, simply click the "Attach PC Specs to this review" checkbox when posting a review. If you do this for the first time, a new window will open where you are asked to confirm your PC configuration. However, the capture is automatic and cannot be changed. If you play on multiple systems, multiple configurations can be saved. The feature is still in beta phase. To use it, you need the Steam beta client.
CPU, GPU and Operating System
Performance problems and crashes are among the most common complaints about PC games on Steam. If a user complaining about this provides their PC information, it gives readers of the review important context: Are the reviewer's specs simply below the minimum requirements? Or are they even playing on a high-end system?
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Steam captures the CPU, RAM, graphics card, and available VRAM. Information about the storage medium (SSD or HDD?) and the target resolution are missing from the captured hardware. After all, in addition to the hardware, Valve also captures the operating system. However, in a test system from heise online, the graphics card was mistakenly recognized as the CPU's onboard graphics – an error that could not be manually corrected.
Many problems have nothing to do with hardware
In any case, it would be a mistake to attribute performance problems and crashes across the board to weak hardware. Poorly optimized games like „Oblivion Remastered“ or „Borderlands 4“ run suboptimally on any possible configuration. Even an RTX 5090, the fastest graphics card on the market, struggles with stuttering here despite a decent frame rate. Game crashes also often have less to do with the hardware used than with the software itself. While the additional information can provide valuable context for reviews, its significance should not be overstretched.
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For many PC gamers, user reviews on Steam are the first point of contact when researching a video game. Since last August, review scores have only been calculated from reviews in your own language by default, in order to filter out cultural differences, for example.
