Summary

• Customizing your gaming experience is key - from crosshairs to gamepads, Steam has you covered with useful apps.
• Streamers, get ready - OBS Studio is a must-have for anyone looking to enhance their content creation experience.
• Explore beyond games - Steam offers a variety of apps like VTube Studio and 3D Mark to elevate your PC experience.

Whether you’re a casual gamer or a hardcore PC enthusiast, you must have heard of Steam. As one of the biggest digital game distribution platforms, Steam has a huge library of games spanning several genres. For those who like gaming on the move, you may also be familiar with the Steam Deck, a highly-capable gaming handheld designed by Valve, Steam’s parent company.

However, there’s a lot more to Steam than games and handhelds. If you’ve ever ventured into the unending list of apps available on Steam, you may have noticed an odd software or two among the thousands of action, RPG, and other titles. Many of these apps are incredible for gamers, and in this article, we’ll cover some of the most useful software on Steam to improve your gaming experience.

10 Crosshair X

For customization connoisseurs

Built for those who love customizing, modding, and fine-tuning every aspect of their games, Crosshair X is a neat app that lets you create and deploy custom crosshairs on your favorite games. It’s compatible with the Xbox Game Bar overlay, and comes with all the tools needed for you to design a crosshair from scratch.

Additionally, you can modify the thousands of presets created by the community, with the designs ranging from a simple dots to colored crosshairs that have special animations when you perform certain in-game actions.

9 Soundpad

You should only use it in casual games, though

Despite sounding (pun intended) rather simple in concept, Soundpad is a solid application if you spend a lot of time interacting with your friends over voice chat. Soundpad can record and edit audio clips before playing them through your microphone. You can even set hotkeys for easy access specific sounds if you want to troll your buddies. Combine Soundpad with horror co-op games like Lethal Company and Dead By Daylight, and you’re bound to get some funny reactions from your friends.

8 DSX

To customize and calibrate your controller

Despite being a member of the PC gaming scene since my childhood days, I’ll confess that I’ve always preferred controllers to keyboards for almost every title that doesn’t belong to the CRPG, FPS, or 4X strategy genres. Having cycled through multiple gamepad customization apps, I always find myself returning to DSX’s simple yet handy UI.

While I’d love to rank DSX higher on the list, it has its fair share of issues. The app's buggy nature, combined with the fact that you need to purchase support for the DualSense controller as a DLC, makes it hard for me to recommend it to owners of Sony’s flagship gamepad.

7 OBS Studio

The best app for streamers. Period.

OBS Studio may be fully free-to-use, but it’s one of the best companions for any up-and-coming game streamer. Besides its compatibility with most of the popular streaming platforms, OBS Studio supports multiple hardware encoders specialized for different GPUs.

With its array of plugins, extensions, and integrations with other tools, OBS Studio is quite a versatile tool and is worth trying even if you’re not into content creation.

6 VTube Studio

The easiest way to create your VTuber persona

Virtual YouTubers featuring Live2D avatars have exploded in popularity over the last couple of years. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a skillful animator to manage your animated VTuber model. VTube Studio is a free application that lets you import a model and translate your actions to the avatar with the help of a webcam.

What’s more, VTube Studio allows you to control pretty much every aspect of your Live2D character, ranging from simple expressions to more complex parameters like auto-blinking and lip-sync.

5 3D Mark

To assess your PC's firepower

Once you've finished building a PC, it's always a good idea to run some benchmarks. That way, you'll know whether your newly-assembled system's performance is on par with the price you paid for the components. Likewise, benchmarking apps are also useful for overclockers, as they can provide some insight into the stability of the OC.

With several testing tools under its belt, 3DMark is easily one of the best benchmarking applications out there. While it has a $35 price tag attached to it, you can go for the 3DMark Demo if you simply wish to benchmark your PC components without uploading the scores online.

4 Wallpaper Engine

Who doesn’t like adorning their PCs with gorgeous wallpapers?

Ask any PC enthusiast about the best wallpaper app, and you’re bound to hear about Wallpaper Engine. Backed by a huge community of talented artists and creators, Wallpaper Engine includes thousands of themes and dynamic wallpapers that you can customize to your liking.

Additionally, the app includes all the tools and effects to convert a static image into a sleek video wallpaper. Wallpaper Engine may not be as useful for gamers as the remaining on this list, but it’s still a worthwhile purchase for any user who likes personalizing their PC with pretty wallpapers.

3 Borderless Gaming

Great for gamers who love multitasking

Borderless fullscreen is a neat display mode that offers the smooth application-switching facilities of windowed mode while covering your entire screen. Although most modern titles include borderless mode alongside windowed and fullscreen options, it’s still possible to come across a game that doesn’t support this facility.

Borderless Gaming is a convenient tool that lets you run any game, application, or .exe file in borderless mode. For those unwilling to purchase it on Steam, you can grab this handy application’s source code from GitHub and compile it using an IDE.

2 Lossless Scaling

Upgrading your PC isn't the only way to increase FPS

PC hardware has gotten a lot more expensive over time, with some of the best graphics cards and CPUs costing a small fortune. Developers may have started implementing DLSS and FSR into their games to improve performance, but not every title supports AI-upscaling algorithms. Lossless Scaling provides a decent solution to your performance conundrums with its frame generation and upscaling facilities.

I’ve spent quite some time with the app on my old rig comprising a Ryzen 5 1600 and a GTX 1080. Sure, its lack of compatibility with G-sync technology is a bummer. I'll also admit that Lossless Scaling's algorithms are far from perfect. Nevertheless, it's extremely easy to use and can work with any title. Heck, the fact that I could run Atomic Heart at 1440p 60FPS on an eight-year-old GPU speaks volumes of Lossless Scaling’s utility.

1 DisplayFusion

Expensive, but worth every penny

Multi-monitor setups are pretty common these days, though the default Windows settings leave a lot to be desired. I recently spent some time with DisplayFusion, and now, I refuse to work on more than one display unless DisplayFusion is up and running.

For starters, the app lets you add separate apps, shortcuts, and options to the Taskbars on different monitors, making your workspace easier to manage. Another one of my favorite features of DisplayFusion is being able to split larger displays into smaller, more manageable screens. And then there are the Wallpaper, Screen Saver, Monitor Fading, and a host of other helpful utilities that make DisplayFusion an essential app for those with more than one monitor.

Steam isn’t just a treasure trove of games

While these are ten of my favorite applications on Steam, there are several other hidden gems available on the platform. SteamVR is a must-have for virtual reality lovers, as it offers multiple settings to calibrate your VR games. Likewise, RPG Maker MZ is great for anyone looking to get into game development.

That said, you should exercise some caution when buying software and tools from Steam. Take Start11, for example. On its own, Stardock’s Start11 is an amazing app with plenty of customization tools for modifying the Start menu on Windows 11. But since the company requires users to pay for newer versions of the app, I can’t recommend Start11 to most users, even though there’s nothing wrong with the app itself.