Valve’s newest endeavor into taking over the world, this time competing with the likes of Twitch to enable streaming of their games to the masses, has finally left beta. Steam Broadcasting allows players to stream any game they play to either their friends, or the public, and without a whole lot of effort either.
Also heading out of beta today is the long awaited, but much welcomed FPS counter in the Steam overlay.
Steam Broadcasting launched via the beta client two months ago, where it saw a rather smooth launch. Now, you can visit any game hub inside Steam, and find a number of popular streams for just about any game. They don’t even need to be Steam games either, as you can stream any game that’s manually added to Steam too.
A month after Steam launched broadcasting capabilities, Valve also added an FPS counter to the overlay screen. It may not seem like a huge addition, but it’s one that many of the community is rather happy about; Valve even listened to feedback, and put in the option to change the colour of the counter itself, as per request.
Here’s the patch notes from the update itself, that should be winging its way to your Steam clients today:
General
- Added Steam Broadcasting. See http://steamcommunity.com/updates/broadcasting for more info.
- Added in-game FPS counter to Steam Overlay
- When Steam has internally scheduled a game update to be queued sometime in the future, the UI will now display a note to the user indicating that time
- Fixed a crash preventing 64-bit Steamworks games from launching on older AMD processors
- Fixed starting Steam if instance is already running in other local Windows user session
- Fixed restoring game specific hardware mouse cursors when exiting the in-game overlay
- Fixed errors in web views not localizing properly
- Fixed occasional crash when trying to validate your email address
- Fixed rendering the Steam Overlay in some D3D8 games.
- Updated Windows Compatibility warnings
- Improved synchronization and smoothness of video playback
- Reduced CPU usage when drawing animated images or videos
- Reduced CPU usage when interacting with the main Steam client window
Big Picture
- Fixed to ask the user if they’d like to launch immediately or begin updating the game if an update is available but the game has been played recently
- When running in 720p mode scale embedded web views so they are readable
- Fixed EULA display occasionally failing to display
- Revised navigation on profile menu
- Fixed crash when entering a screenshot description
- Fixed displaying screenshots for games added by shortcut
- In-Home Streaming
- Fixed severe frame drop in OpenGL games that occasionally occurred on some hardware
- Reduced impact on game frame rate in D3D9c games when not using hardware acceleration
Linux
- Fixed a rare bug where Steam could delete user files when failing to start
SteamOS
- Fixed some combo boxes in steam client settings accepting text input when selection must be made from dropdown