10

I'm running on an older machine so resources are limited; this is not a gaming rig. As such, I'm trying to maximize system resources by turning off unnecessary things.

Does the Steam overlay consume additional resources? I assume it must, but how much? Is there a process I can monitor in Task Manager to see RAM allocation? Is there a way to disable the Steam overlay entirely?

Improve this question
1
  • Yeah, there's a process in windows called gameoverlay or steamoverlaygui or something like that, should be pretty easy to monitor (and you can just close it from there, if you'd like). Commented Aug 26, 2013 at 22:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
9

The separate process which handles the overlay is called GameOverlayUI.exe on Windows, and gameoverlayui on Mac. [Don't know yet for Linux.] If the overlay is disabled, or if the overlay does not recognize/support the game window, then the overlay process will not even be running.

The overlay can be disabled per-game or everywhere:

  • For an individual game, select the game in Steam and go to Properties → General → Enable Steam Community In-Game. This option is not available for shortcuts to “non-Steam games”.

  • For all of Steam, go to Settings (or Preferences on Mac) → In-Game → Enable Steam Community In-Game.

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    If you turn off the overlay does that actually not run the associated program or does it just not bind Shift+Tab (or whatever) to show/hide it? Commented Aug 26, 2013 at 22:27
  • @NickT Good question. I'll check that too. I expect it would, since for some “non-Steam games” the overlay can actually cause crashes. Commented Aug 26, 2013 at 22:44

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.