The Steam overlay allows you to surf the web and message friends while in-game, but can also cause performance issues with some games. Disabling the Steam overlay will allow games that have those performance issues to run more smoothly. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Does Steam overlay affect performance?

Steam's FPS counter shouldn't have any noticeable performance impacts, as it doesn't in other games. Steam's FPS counter heavily affects performance, resulting in drops from 72 to 40 FPS in one instance. Framerates drop by 30 at average. The game's butter smooth when steam's FPS Counter's turned off.

Does Steam overlay cause crashes?

The Steam overlay is used in thousands of games and as such it has been very thoroughly tested and is rarely the cause of a crash. However, because of the way it injects itself into the game, it does often expose memory leaks or memory corruption in the usage of your rendering API that may not have impacted game play.