A major improvement to Valve’s Steam Reviews system will allow gamers who leave a review to share their system specs to further inform others of a game’s technical state, and help PC Gaming become less of a sack-ache.

Since the introduction of Steam Reviews back in 2013, the system has been a little ropey. Major improvements such as the split of Overall and Recent Reviews has helped, although review bombs are still a frequent occurrence, but it’s always been hard to tell if a player moaning about technical performance is even playing the game on supported hardware.

Available now in the latest Steam Client Beta branch, players will now have the “option to attach hardware specs when writing or updating a Steam User Review on a game’s store page”. It’s worth noting that this is not a mandatory option, and players do have to opt-in to share their hardware specs on a review.

Additionally, Valve has added the option to provide “anonymised framerate data” which will allow Steam to “collect gameplay framerate data, stored without connection to your Steam account but identified with the kind of hardware you are playing on”.

For now, the latter option is designed mostly around SteamOS devices, including Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine, which should help users of Valve’s handheld deem what is actually playable under the extremely tenuous “Verified” tag for the hardware.

However, as the feature starts rolling out, these options—if players decide to use them—should help everyone actually find out whether a game actually runs like dookie, or if someone is playing the game on a ten-year-old rig that doesn’t actually support the game in the first place.

With game updates now adding horrific DRM software that ruins performance years after launch or having wildly out-of-order system requirements, it’s fantastic that Valve is working to let the PC gaming community help each other. If you see a Steam review with system specs similar to your own that provides framerate data, you will be able to decide whether you think the game is acceptable before buying it.

With how frustrating PC ports of games have been as of late—especially with the arrival of Unreal Engine 5 “stutter struggle”—these features should mean we know longer have to waste time buying a game, playing two hours, and then refunding it over performance woes. A purchase should not be the only way to find out if a game actually runs on your rig, and this is one clever solution to that.