Someone at Valve got their unit prefixes a bit muddled but a quick update for the latest Steam beta has fixed your slower-than-normal CPU reading

A screenshot of the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077, with the Steam performance overlay showing at the top of the screen — (Image credit: Valve/CD Projekt Red)

In the world of science, SI prefixes are sacrosanct. Well, unless you happen to be a computing scientist, in which case the choice of prefix—mega vs mebi—can be a little controversial. It turns out that one programmer at Valve fell on the wrong side of the prefix war when showing your CPU clocks in the Steam performance overlay, but at least it's all been fixed with a tiny patch.

Last week, Valve added a performance overlay to the current Steam beta, and I have to say that it's quite nifty-looking. You get frame rates, clock speeds, processor utilisation, and memory consumption (RAM and VRAM), all in a handy bar that you place around your screen.

Mind you, I wish other companies would fix their overlays or performance monitors as quickly as this. Without wishing to sound like a moaning Minnie, Nvidia's Frameview still insists on forgetting key bindings or folder selections. Yes, the team behind it is very small (i.e. one or two people) and it's hardly a high priority for things that Nvidia needs to fix, but if Valve can do it, so can others.

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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?

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