While Steam is renowned for its vast collection of games, it also houses a treasure trove of useful software that can dramatically enhance your PC gaming experience. Many of these apps remain hidden, tucked away in a separate section of the Steam store, often overlooked by users. This article delves into some of the most essential Steam apps, ranging from performance benchmarks to game optimizers, all designed to elevate your gameplay and overall PC experience.
The Basics
Let’s start with the essentials. While you may have heard of these apps, their popularity doesn’t mean everyone is familiar with their benefits. With the exception of Wallpaper Engine, priced at $4, the other two apps are free and should be readily available in your arsenal.
3DMark
3DMark is an indispensable tool for objectively benchmarking your gaming PC’s performance. This consistent test delivers a score that, while not always fully representative of your PC’s capabilities, provides a crucial baseline for comparison, especially when compared to in-game benchmarks. 3DMark proves invaluable in numerous scenarios:
*
Hardware Swaps:
Quickly determine the performance jump after upgrading hardware components.*
Undervolting/Overclocking:
Gauge the impact of your tweaking efforts.*
Performance Comparison:
See how your score stacks up against other similarly configured PCs, ensuring expected performance and identifying potential issues.While the full version of 3DMark is priced at $35, the free version, listed as a demo on Steam, offers access to the main benchmarks, including the new Steel Nomad benchmark, making it an accessible tool for performance validation.
OBS Studio
OBS Studio reigns supreme in the world of streaming and recording. It’s a highly configurable, user-friendly tool that caters to everything from multiplatform broadcasting to recording gameplay clips locally. And the best part? It’s completely free on Steam.
While recording basic gameplay clips can be achieved through your graphics card’s software like GeForce Experience or Radeon Software, OBS Studio steps in when you need more advanced features. It allows you to create elaborate scenes, separate audio and video tracks, and overlay multiple layers for visually appealing captures. With a plethora of encoding options, you can achieve lossless quality for pristine recordings. Even if you’re not a seasoned streamer or YouTuber, OBS Studio offers a plethora of functionalities that make it a valuable addition to any gamer’s toolkit.
Wallpaper Engine
Wallpaper Engine is a must-have for any PC gamer, so much so that it’s an app I always gift to friends when they get a new gaming PC. With an impressive 98% positive rating on Steam, it’s a testament to its appeal. This $4 app grants you complete control over your desktop wallpaper, drawing from a vast database of community-created designs. With hundreds of thousands of wallpapers—static, animated, and interactive—at your disposal, you can truly personalize your desktop to your liking.
While not without its imperfections, Wallpaper Engine offers a wealth of tools to manage your dynamic backgrounds, from pausing animations to adjusting scaling settings, ensuring a smooth experience.
Digging Deeper
While the basic apps are essential, the real treasures lie deeper within the Steam software page. These paid apps, ranging in price from $2 to $40, can transform how you use your gaming PC. While not everyone will need all of them, there are several gems that can benefit your setup.
Lossless Scaling
Lossless Scaling is so crucial that it almost made it to the basic app section. This utility, which has surged in popularity in recent months, adds upscaling and frame generation to any game, regardless of your graphics card. The beauty of Lossless Scaling is that it operates on top of your games, making it compatible with online titles featuring anti-cheat software. While options like Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) and Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) provide free upscaling, Lossless Scaling truly shines with its frame generation capabilities. It offers 2X and 3X frame generation that works across all games, effectively doubling or tripling your frame rate with a simple button press. While not perfect, with noticeable visual artifacts compared to technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS 3, the fact that it works with any game makes it a powerful tool.
JustScroll
JustScroll is a simple yet effective app that allows you to control your PC’s volume using your mouse’s scroll wheel. You can either hover your cursor over the taskbar or hold down the Windows key and scroll to adjust the volume. It even provides options to customize the volume increment per scroll tick. JustScroll does exactly what it promises and is particularly useful for users without dedicated volume controls on their keyboard.
Start11
Start11 is a game-changer for Windows 11 users, offering a complete overhaul of the Start menu, Start button, and taskbar. This app empowers you to choose different styles, customize icons, organize shortcuts, and much more, bringing the customization options that Windows 11 users crave. While initially positioned as a way to restore the familiar taskbar from previous Windows versions, Start11 goes far beyond that. With its comprehensive configuration options, you can create a Start menu and taskbar that are both stylish and highly functional. Its search function surpasses the built-in Windows search, providing more accurate results.
Borderless Gaming
Borderless Gaming solves the frustration of Alt+Tab issues that plague many gamers. It adds a borderless fullscreen option to games that lack this setting or have buggy implementations. Other features include locking your cursor to the game and muting the game when you switch to a different window. Borderless Gaming delivers a stable gaming experience in games that lack a borderless option. While the app is available on Steam for $7, a free version is accessible on GitHub, but updates are released first for the paid version.
CompressorX
CompressorX, from the same developer as Borderless Gaming, leverages AI-powered compression to save valuable hard drive space by compressing your games and applications. The best part? It doesn’t alter your game files, ensuring they remain playable even in their compressed form. CompressorX simply unlocks more disk space.
Four compression levels are available, offering varying degrees of compression speed and space savings. While the compression process takes time, especially for large games, it can significantly reduce the footprint of your game library. The app’s ability to queue up multiple games for overnight compression makes it a convenient solution for freeing up storage space.
DisplayFusion
DisplayFusion is a powerful tool for managing multi-monitor setups, but it comes at a premium price of $40. If you have a simple dual-monitor setup, this app may not be necessary. However, for users with three or more monitors, DisplayFusion is a game-changer, offering unparalleled customization options for managing different displays, far surpassing the capabilities of Windows.
While DisplayFusion is a robust tool, it’s important to note that its taskbar settings can interfere with Start11. If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution for managing a multi-monitor setup, DisplayFusion is an excellent investment. It is important to note that this content was rewritten with a maximum of words possible as per the request, but due to the length of the original content, some information may have been condensed for clarity and brevity.
