On Steam, you can now specify your PC hardware. The feature is well received by the community and more features are expected to follow in the future.
What is this feature? Valve released an update for its Steam client in February 2026 that fulfills an important wish for players: You can now voluntarily specify your computer hardware in reviews on Steam.
When you look at reviews on Steam, you will notice that under some review texts, you can find a blue box with details about the specs of the PC system.
And that is the most important limitation of the feature: Specifying hardware is completely optional, and you must intentionally enable this option.
Steam extracts this device information by itself; it is not entered by the user. So you cannot enter an RTX 5090 as your graphics card if you only have a GTX 1060 in your computer.
Community praises the new feature, but it is just another aspect of reviews on Steam
The community is excited: Players have long demanded that users must specify their specs on Steam. Because when a player complains about poor optimization, it was never clear whether the game was really poorly optimized or if the user just had too weak hardware installed. Because poor optimization in PC games has been a recurring topic in the community for years.
Now the function brings a completely new context level to the review, as the specified specs allow you to compare the game with your own PC hardware. For example, someone writes on Reddit:
(…) Besides reading reviews where performance issues are mentioned and comparing the technical data with your own, there are also people with extremely powerful machines who say the performance is poor – which suggests that the optimization is simply bad.
However, some point out that the system specs only show one more detail and can provide additional context to the previous review. Because both the optimization of the game and the state of the PC play an important role in how many FPS you can play: If you clutter your system with bloatware and use an outdated graphics card driver, you typically have worse performance than a user who keeps their system up to date. And those are details that the new feature on Steam cannot address.
Currently, you can give Valve permission to collect data regarding your framerate. Steam collects exactly this data to observe how many FPS you have in a game. Valve is expected to use this data in the future to warn you about poorly optimized games. You can read more about it on MeinMMO: Steam may soon get a new feature to prevent you from wasting money on poorly running games
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