There are LOTS of FPS trackers out there, but many people seem to go straight to MSI Afterburner. Which I kind of get because it IS a powerful FPS counter (& it also displays a bunch of other useful stats) – but I’m just not a massive fan of Afterburner, to be honest.
As a result, I have tested out loads of different FPS counters – and I think that I have finally found my two favorite ones, which I show off in this video.
These are:
If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.
Video Transcript And Guide
Hey everyone, when it comes to tracking FPS rates in our computer games, many people use MSI Afterburner. It’s the one all the big YouTubers use, and I can understand why because it’s fairly powerful and gives you lots of stats. But for some reason, it’s just never really gelled with me. Maybe I’ve got a simple mind, I don’t know. But as a result, I’ve tested lots of different FPS trackers, and I’ve actually recently settled on two that are my absolute favorite.
One of them is paid for, but it is really powerful and does have a free demo if you wanted to try it out. And then the other one is actually recently released; it’s pretty brand new, to be honest. It’s really clean, simple, and free, and it’s a really nice, powerful bit of software as well. So I want to show them both off in this video.
Clean Meter (Free)

So, the first FPS tracker I wanted to cover is Clean Meter, which is the free one. It’s really simple and really sleek. I haven’t got many settings enabled there, but you can actually show more options if you wanted. This came about due to a post by Violet Mars on Reddit, who came up with this design and asked people for their thoughts. People really liked it. So, then an amazing Portuguese developer called Slim Dude on Reddit actually developed it in just a few days and came up with a really simple early delivery for people to try out.
Although it was reliant on MSI Afterburner and you had to do a bunch of config, so it was a little bit clunky, and people didn’t really love that. But because Dano is a brilliant developer, they’ve got rid of all those external dependencies, and Clean Meter is now its own standalone app.
This is what Clean Meter looks like in Cyberpunk. You can see it there in the top left. Again, I’ve got fairly minimal settings. You can show more if you actually wanted. It just looks really nice, really simple, and really sleek, which is the whole point of the design.
In terms of how you actually set things up, you go to the GitHub, click on Releases, and then you get the latest release if you want that one. Download it, and then once it’s downloaded, you unzip it on your computer. I use NanaZip, but you can obviously use whatever you want to unzip it. Then, it’s simply a set of portable files. You don’t actually need to install this; you just need to accept the UAC prompt, Although it is worth pointing out that if you don’t have the .net Core Runtime, you will need this, so just go to the link on the GitHub and then you download
this from microsoft.com and then it’s really simple to install and then you launch CleanMeter.
Clean Meter Config
And this is CleanMeter and this is the UI that I wanted to quickly show off. It is worth pointing out that by default the overlay will always show up, but there is this shortcut there: Control Alt F10 if you wanted to disable it, if you’re on a desktop or something like that. I actually quite like it, even when I’m on the desktop because it does look quite nice and sleek (especially once you configure things a little bit) but obviously I wanted to show all the config options first. Now I should say – and I’ll go to the style section later – but if you find this too in your face or whatever, you can lower the opacity down quite a lot and you can also change the graphs and the orientation and things like that. But for now I’ll just show it as full opacity so you can actually see that so in terms of config the FPS section has a value for the FPS, and also the frame time graph.
So you can see your stutters and things like that, often I just run with the frame count if I just want a really minimalist setup, but obviously it is nice to have that frame graph too. And then you come to the GPU section and let’s say when we got GPU temperature selected, it’ll automatically show that GPU temperature but if you want you can actually choose a different sensor. So if you find that the hotspot value is something that’s more interesting to you – or more useful to you – you can select that if you want. I don’t like seeing it over 100° celsus, it scares me, so I’m going to change that back. Same as GPU usage: you know, by default it’ll select the 3D load one. If however you’re doing lots of compute stuff or copy stuff maybe you’ll want to change that value, but in general I’ll just leave it like that. VRAM usage as well, once you select that then you’re obviously going to see your total VRAM usage as well. There, it’s quite loaded out here.
Then you come to your CPU usage and you got the temperature and the CPU usage there. Again you can toggle things on and off, and if you wanted you can actually change things so I could just say I want load on one core or I could say I want the the max load or – you know – in this case I’ve just got the total load, and again you can do the same with the CPU temperature. Sometimes I actually like my TDie which is quite high at the moment at 80°C, but obviously you know I can show that too. RAM usage, you can that on and off. I got 64 gigs in this system so that’s why the graph isn’t very loaded even though I’ve got 26 gig in use. Then it comes to your network and you don’t have to have that if you don’t want it if you do want it you can have these little arrows that just show the send and receive speed.
So whether you’re actively downloading and uploading, and then obviously you can have a network graph too, which obviously just shows your traffic there which is quite nice, but obviously as I said you can actually change all of that and turn things off. So if you only want to see your CPU temperature, and your GPU temperature, you could just turn all that off and just have a really minimalist, sleek thing there if you wanted. Or as I said, you can add more things on too. If you’ve got multiple monitors, you can also choose which monitor this should show up on.
I’m actually pleasantly surprised at just how far this tool has come in the last few weeks because when I first tested it, when it had been out for just four days, it was pretty good but also a little bit clunky, and how you configured everything wasn’t always ideal.
You can also switch the style and configure things exactly as you would like. So, you could put it in different parts of the screen. As you can see, I’m just moving it around there. I tend to like having mine in the top left. You can have it wherever you would like, or you can have a custom position. So, you can click that and then click “Unlock” and basically move it around to exactly where you want. I’ll just keep mine at the top left though.
Then you can come to the orientation. You can have it coming down like that, or you can have it like this—it’s completely up to you. Obviously, MSI Afterburner tends to go down the screen and show stats, so I quite like being different to that and just having things horizontally, just like I like my taskbar and stuff like that. But again, if you want to change it, you can change it. It’s quite a nice look.
Opacity as well—you can lower that. So, you could actually lower things down quite a lot, and it’ll barely show up. You can still read things, and that’s quite nice as well because if you’re gaming, you’re barely going to see it, but you can just glance at it when you want. It doesn’t get in the way too much. So, in my opinion, you get the best of both worlds.
Let me put that back up though, so we can see the next bit. You can then choose different graphs as well. So, you could actually have the data showing up as a bar graph instead of a ring graph if you wanted, and that’s pretty cool as well. You can actually have this start up with Windows and start minimized so it’s always running, if you wanted. I just tend to leave it and only enable it when I want, but that’s completely up to you.
If you do want it to start with Windows, you then need to make sure this is running as an admin and all that. Of course, it’s not perfect though, as I’ve shown off. So, Danilo, the developer working on it, has done an amazing job and is constantly doing releases. But there are bugs, and that’s entirely to be expected. Actually, the version I’ve shown off here is like a beta release anyway, so it’s not exactly fair that I’m showing it off in some ways.
That’s why I wanted to highlight the fact that it is a beta release—you can’t completely rely on exactly what you see because there will be some bugs. Also, Clean Meter doesn’t support exclusive fullscreen mode. It’ll support fullscreen with the hidden border, it’ll support bordered, and also windowed mode—whatever your game calls it. But exclusive fullscreen mode? It just won’t work with it, and it just won’t display stats.
But to be honest, nowadays, we might have Discord and web pages open and things like that when we’re gaming, so I actually never really game in exclusive fullscreen mode anyway. But if you do rely on that, then you won’t be able to use Clean Meter for this. So, that is definitely worth knowing.
FPS Monitor (Paid)
The next bit of software I wanted to look at though was FPS Monitor, which is a paid-for tool. You can see FPS Monitor on the left-hand side now. But it is very configurable. This is actually a particular scene that I quite like, and I’ve added C drive read and write data as well.
You can configure things completely as you would like—you don’t need to have this particular look and feel. In terms of FPS Monitor, it’s a really great tool. It’s got loads of different features. As you can see on the web page now, you can do benchmarking and recording data and things like that, and you can configure things exactly as you would like, as I mentioned before.
So here, you’ve actually got more of an MSI Afterburner type feel to things. It’s a lot more configurable. In terms of the price, it’s $9.95 if you buy directly through them, or you can buy it through Steam, but that is slightly more expensive. Whether you buy it or just want the demo, you can download it from their web page through the link.
The installation process is really simple. This is not a portable app—you need to install it. It’s really easy to install, and it’s already done—that’s it.
FPS Monitor Config

When FPS Monitor boots up, you’ll be presented with a screen like this. As you can see from the stats, they actually all update, which is quite nice because, as you’re designing your actual overlay or scene, you can see things update in real-time. That’s really nice, although it is quite confusing. It’s not really a drag-and-drop type thing. You don’t select this and just drag it on.
As you’ve seen there, I have to actually click something, press “Add,” then select the type of chart that I want. In this case, I’ve gone for “Experimental,” whatever that means, and it shows up there. But if you are confused, then you’ve got all these preset scenes.
Up here, you’ve got scenes, and to be honest, I tend to just go with the “All 1440p.” I have configured it slightly—I’ve moved things around a bit to make things wider, and I’ve also added this C drive read/write data up here because I find that quite useful when gaming for my own reference.
Obviously, you can just go through all the different scenes and see what there is. This one doesn’t take up as much room, but it contains loads of data, so it is really useful. Up here on the right, you can change what resolution you’re actually looking at. It won’t actually resize things—you can just see what the overlay will look like at different resolutions.
If you know you’re going to run a game at 720p (well, that’s a weird resolution), but if you knew that, then obviously you can use this to design your overlay. I’ll just go back to 1440p.
As you can see, it’s not always the most intuitive. You have all these different scenes. If we just go back to this one though, because I quite like that, let’s say you wanted to resize this particular bit. Unfortunately, you can’t just drag and resize everything. All I’ve done there is just resize the box, which isn’t really ideal.
If you actually wanted bigger font, for example, you need to click it, come over to “Item Settings,” and look at your font size, then change it there. For example, you’ve seen it change there. Now it’s too big, so I’d actually need to adjust that. I’d need to do this, and then make everything a bit bigger. But you can see, it’s not really the most dynamic.
Then I could put the box back, but it doesn’t really scale out as much as it should. So, it is a little bit more clunky than some of the other options. But it is also insanely powerful. For example, I mentioned I wanted to see my NVMe read and write stats, and I could just really easily add that.
Or if I wanted, you know, I could come along and do something else. I could come along and look at my motherboard stats. I might want to look at what my voltage rails are. So, I can suddenly say, “Right, I want this to show the data for the 12V rail, and I want this to show the data for the 5V rail”—not that that’s used much anymore.
Then suddenly, I’ll just change this to say, “Motherboard Rails (Like a Boss)” because I feel very boss-like by actually putting that on there. But, you know, if you were experimenting with things and benchmarking things, and you really wanted to know these values, it would be pretty cool to have that.
There’s absolutely loads of different things you can have. I mean, when you’re looking at a game, you’ve got loads of different sensors there. You’ve got loads of other system stats available to you, including page files—it’s not just the actual RAM, it’s your page file and your virtual RAM, and all of that.
CPU—you’ve got absolutely tons of stats as well. As you can see, there’s the Infinity Fabric clock and loads of different things. Then, for CPU cores, you can put data on for each individual core. This is a 12-core CPU, so I’m just going to keep scrolling, but yeah, there’s a lot there.
GPU—again, there’s actually loads of different things you can put on there. I’ll whiz through this now because you probably don’t want to see it too much.
Motherboard memory—you know, there’s loads of different things you can put on this as well. As I mentioned, I have data on there for that, for my read and write speeds.
Then you’ve got network adapters. This is also something I’ve used in the past where I wanted to see my upload and download rates for my 10-gig card. So, I was able to just have those actually display data as well, which is also a pretty cool thing you can do.
Finally, you’ve got the network stats—pings as well, if you wanted to know where your pings are. So that is pretty cool.
That is FPS Monitor, and again, you can then save your scene once you’re done changing it. Then you just launch up your games in the normal way, and it’ll all appear. So, it is very clunky, but it is also cool as well.
[Music]
So, as you can see, it’s not the most intuitive bit of software. To be honest, when I first installed it a year or two ago, I literally found the “Benchmark 1440p” option, and I just kept it at that because that was good enough for 4K and obviously 1440p too. It showed up fine without taking up too much space, and that’s what I ran with for a very long time.
But recently, I’ve been messing around with it and playing around with it more, and now I actually really do like it. I really like the power of it. For example, in a recent video, I was working on gaming over the network.
So, I stored my games on my Home Lab NAS and also my technology NAS, and then I was playing them on my computer. What I did in FPS Monitor was I actually put a bar graph for the network traffic. That was really cool because then, when I’m gaming, I’ve got my FPS rates for my local computer, but I can also see all my network activity streaming from the Home Lab NAS.
That was a really good way of actually doing things. So, I kind of feel like if you’re doing lots of benchmarking or you just really want to see some detailed stats, FPS Monitor is probably the best way to go.
So, they are the two FPS monitors that I like the most. But I do actually talk about a lot more FPS trackers in another video if you wanted to check that out.
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