FPS counters are a valuable part of the PC gaming experience: they allow us to see how AMAZING our computers are, and then we can laud it over console gamers.
Kidding. Kinda.
After spending our valuable cash to build (or buy) a gaming computer, it IS very useful to keep an eye on our framerates so that we can know that our PC’s hardware is performing as expected. FPS trackers also allow us to see where a game is struggling, and we can then tweak the settings for a smoother gaming experience.
Many people just use MSI Afterburner for FPS tracking, but there’s a LOAD more tools out there – which I explore in this video.
If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.
Video Transcript And Guide
Hey everyone, we all want to know EXACTLY what frame rates our games are running at. After all, we’ve worked hard to build or buy awesome computers that can eclipse anything that consoles can deliver – so why wouldn’t we want to track our FPS rates and then shouts this from the rooftops? Many people nowadays use MSI Afterburner to display their FPS counter, which I’ll show in a second, but there’s actually NINE other really great ways of showing your FPS counter in games, so I’ll cover these too.
MSI Afterburner
I’ll quickly start with MSI Afterburner since pretty much every tutorial online recommends this. You don’t need to have an MSI graphics card to use this software, and it’s actually pretty powerful. You can download it for free from msi.com and during the installation process, make sure that you include RivaTurner otherwise you won’t get any FPS stats (it’s the thing that actually powers it). Once it’s finished, open it up and head on over to the settings menu. This isn’t always the most straightforward area to configure, but if you want hardware monitoring and graph generation, then scroll down in the Monitoring section and tick all the Framerate options.
Under “Show in in-screen display”, if you want to see the GPU temp as a graph then select text and graph.Then head over to the on-screen display area and set a hotkey for the relevant options. You can set a single hotkey here for toggle and this will show and hide the FPS counter, or you can specify separate hotkeys for them – it’s up to you. Finally if you want the full framerate data including 1% and 0.1% lows, head over to benchmark and select hotkeys to start and stop recording. This will allow you to capture the right data for the framerate counter.
It’s really useful to get all this extra framerate data because having just a single framerate counter doesn’t always tell the full story. For example there might be sections of the game where you framerate drops to 20 fps, and you’ll need to know this so you can then look to optimize your settings and have a smoother gaming experience.
So there’s a lot of positive to MSI Afterburner but unfortunately some people have reported that the FPS counter doesn’t show up on some games. This is because MSI Afterburner actually uses RivaTurner under the hood, and this software is powerful – but can be a bit buggy in how it detects whether a game is running or not. It basically tries to look at whether specific game engines are running, and then display the FPS overlay then. Unfortunately this doesn’t always work, meaning that MSI Afterburner then won’t show an FPS counter.
Equally some games, like Battlefield 2042, have issues where the EA anti-cheat software or DRM actually conflicts with the FPS overlay and basically blocks it.
Steam
In that case, what’s the alternative? Well if you game through Steam, which let’s be honest, most of us do – then you might be familiar with Steam’s own FPS counter. You can enable it by clicking Steam in the top left and clicking on Settings. A new menu will pop up, and in here navigate to the “In Game” tab. You will see two settings for an in-game FPS counter. You can firstly choose WHERE on the screen the FPS counter should be displayed – I tend to like choosing bottom right here just so that it’s out of the way, but you can naturally tweak this to your liking. There’s then an option to display the FPS counter in a high contrast color and I usually like keeping this enabled because when it’s off, you can BARELY see the FPS counter. It’s in a light gray font and so it doesn’t really stand out when you’re gaming. As a result I often game with the high contrast toggle enabled because it then has a solid black background color and a clear green font – meaning that you can still see it fairly easily.
Unless, of course, you game in higher than 1080p resolution – in which case the counter will be REALLY, REALLY small. Users have asked Steam to be able to change the font size for ages, but Valve have never delivered this. You can then either move onto one of the other methods, or you can try hacking one of the Steam config files. I’ll put further details in the description for this, but open up File Explorer, click on your C drive (or wherever Steam is installed) then go to Program Files x86, Steam, resource then layout. Scroll down to the ingamefpsbanner.layout file. Before editing this file though, I should quickly point that you really should copy and paste the file to make a backup of it – that’s just in-case you corrupt the file and Steam keeps crashing on you, or something. You’ll probably find that you can increase the font-size values here to 24 or so, and the FPS counter will then appear bigger in games.
However some people still find this too small, especially when 4K gaming, so they have tried pushing the font size up to 36 or so. Unfortunately this often results in the FPS counter getting cut off when running Steam. I actually kinda like this because I’m not too concerned about seeing the letters “FPS” here – I just want the number. So this IS a cool way of increasing the Steam FPS counter size, but you might need to work and do some trial and error, and tweak these values a bunch of times before finding the right setting for you and for your resolution.
Epic And GoG
So that covers Steam, but what happens if you game with Epic Games, GoG Galaxy or (God forbid) Ubisoft Connect?
Well Epic Games doesn’t actually have any built in FPS counter which is a pity, because it’s actually a decent enough platform otherwise – especially due to all the free games they give us! Having said that, if you play Rocket League through Epic Games, you CAN hit F10 and you then get an overlay with some pretty useful stats – including your minimum and average frame rates (which is fairly useful!). The only downside is that this isn’t actually an Epic Games feature – it’s actually built into the Rocket League engine. But Rocket League is quite a popular game on the EPic platform so I quickly wanted to mention this specific fact (incase you game with Rocket League).
If you game through GoG Galaxy, the situation is a bit more confusing – unfortunately. GoG is MEANT to have overlay support by clicking Shift and Tab when you’re in game. This overlay is then meant to show the game’s FPS, amongst other things. Unfortunately I’ve never actually been able to get this overlay to show up in the handful of games that I have on my GoG library – although granted they ARE quite old games (some dating back two decades or more!)
Apparently there is a “hack” you can try to always force the overlay on, by opening up Windows File Explorer and typing “C:\ProgramData” in the address bar. Then click GoG.com, and then Galaxy. Find the file called config.json, and add a line there setting forceEnableOverlay to be true.
I should caution that you need to know JSON before editing this file – you can’t just blindy add that line in, because the PREVIOUS line should have a comma added (if you add this entry in as the last entry, that is). Basically, you need to make sure that your edit still leads to a valid JSON file – otherwise it could crash the game.
Once this is done, in theory you can re-boot a game through the GoG launcher and the overlay will always be there. But as I say, this has never worked for me – and it doesn’t seem to work for all these Balder’s Gate 3 users either, which is a pity. Maybe GoG will improve overlay support soon though? I just don’t know.
Ubisoft Connect
Luckily, though, Ubisoft have saved the day. Their overlay DOES appear and it supports an FPS counter – woohoo, I love Ubisoft. Kidding. To activate this overlay, boot up a game and then hit Shift and F2. This will open up the Ubisoft overlay. Find the FPS option under Stats, and enable this. An FPS counter will then appear in-game, and it works fairly well. I mean, it IS just an FPS counter – nothing else is displayed. There also aren’t any configuration options like being able to move it or make the font size bigger or smaller, which is a pity.
But it’s still good that Ubisoft does offer an FPS counter natively, I guess.
FRAPS (Old School Cool?!)
Moving on, let’s say that you don’t want to rely on your game launcher’s FPS counter, a popular option from the past was FRAPS. In fact this was the de facto standard until… they completely stopped updating the software. Its last update was in 2013 – yikes! That IS a big concern and FRAPS doesn’t work for RECENT games (as I’ll cover in a second) but if you mainly play older games, you CAN still safely download and install fraps from fraps.com. I actually installed it just fine on Windows 11.
The interface looks a bit blurry and buggy at 4K resolution, but you can still easily configure where you want the FPS counter to appear. You then launch up your game and BAM, the old school FRAPS FPS counter with its distinctive yellow text and black background appears. This works just fine for older games – it accurately tracks the FPS and it updates really frequently. Of course it doesn’t include things like min, max and 1% low counts that modern FPS trackers do – something I’ll touch on a bit shortly.
What I DO have to point out, though, is that because Fraps hasn’t been updated in 11 years, it does not support modern game engineers like Vulkan and DirectX 12 – so there’s LOADS of recent games that it just won’t reliably work with. That’s a pity but if you’re playing an old game and you’re feeling nostalgic, FRAPS WILL still work for you!
XBox Game Bar
Now let’s look at some more modern solutions. Windows 10 and 11 have the XBox Game Bar and this is actually a pretty awesome way of seeing your FPS count and more when gaming. To get started, click on the windows key and G and this will open the XBox overlay. If you don’t see any FPS counter here, don’t worry – just click the Performance tab a few times and the window should appear in the bottom left.
It shows CPU, GPU, VRAM and RAM usage which is pretty nice. It also has an FPS counter but you do need to be in-game to actually see this. You can configure the settings a fair bit too, turning off certain stats that you don’t need – along with tweaking the color of the text, how transparent the background should be, and the layout of the widget. Once you’re done setting this all up, you should pin it to the screen and THEN launch your game – and the FPS counter will then kick into life – which is nice to see.
There are a couple of downsides to the XBox Game Bar though – firstly it doesn’t always appear in streaming or screen capture programs like OBS, which is why I’m recording this section on my phone (as you can see). Equally the widget can actually block your clicks in game (which sucks!) – one time a game had a “Continue” button underneath the FPS counter, and I needed to hit Windows key and G to MOVE the counter before I could actually click Continue in-game, which was a bit rubbish. This approach also doesn’t support 1% lows (for your FPS tracking) or anything like that, which is a pity.
AMD Metrics Overlay
The next option open to you is to use the overlay that’s built into your graphic card’s software – so AMD Software or NVIDIA GeForce Experience. I’ll start off with AMD’s Software and to activate this you need to launch the software, then click the Performance tab at the top, and then press Overlay on the side. Toggle the Enable Metrics Overlay option and you then get a nice overlay appear which includes the 99th perceline FPS rate which is pretty nice – this is basically the 1% low, so the times when your game’s graphics are taxing your CPU or GPU a bit too much and you get FPS rate drops.
You can also configure the size of the overlay, you can also change how many columns it should run over and also the transparency. It allows you to change the colors too. So in short, this is much more powerful than relying on something like Steam’s own FPS counter. For some reason though, it wasn’t displaying my CPU Temp (as you can see), but I can see that in other programs like HwInfo so I don’t mind too much. I also like seeing how much power my graphics card is actually using, especially because many of us worry whether our PSU is actually supplying enough power to our GPU. Knowing the exact power usage helps a lot with this.
GeForce With NVIDIA
GeForce Experience for NVIDIA graphics cards also has similar FPS tracking support. I don’t have an NVIDIA card but I’m showing a useful video now that covers how to enable the in-game overlay and then configure it so that an FPS counter will appear in your games – and you can see that you’re able to move the position of the FPS counter around. Then when you launch a game, you have a simple FPS counter appearing. You can also hit Alt and Z to bring up the GeForce overlay and tweak the settings further if you would like.
I’m assuming that you can display more than just the FPS counter based on all the videos I’ve watch of this feature, but obviously I haven’t been able to try it out myself so please let us know down in the comments exactly what stats you can enable. Does it support 1% lows for example? I’d really want to know.
FPS Monitor (Paid)
Next up we have a paid for solution and I personally LOVE this one, but I’m not affiliated with them or anything – I paid $10 for a license out of my own money [because it’s a tax write-off). So this is FPS Monitor and it has a crazy amount of configuration options – probably more than any other FPS counter I’ve covered so far.
You can show LOADS of detail, or just keep it minimal. You can also try it out with a free demo, but if you plan to use this software much then you will need to buy a license which basically costs $10. You can configure pretty much everything within this tool and it can show anything from your disk usage, to very specific memory settings. You can also add new widgets anywhere on your screen (in addition to the default ones) to configure exactly how you like it to look and while it IS quite confusing to configure at first, it also is really powerful. However if you ever get stuck (or bored) of configuring FPS Monitor, you can actually choose from a range of different preset scenes. There’s some really minimal ones, and some with LOADS of stats:
I personally quite like the 1440p one because it contains quite a lot of stats without being overpowering, and it looks fairly good at 4K resolutions in my opinion. The scene I’m using now doesn’t show 1% lows but that’s my own choice – I could enable this if I wanted to. It DOES show min and max FPS rates though, along with things like my fan speeds and more.
RivaTurner Stats Server
Before wrapping up, the last FPS monitor that I wanted to cover is RivaTurner. This is actually what powers MSI Afterburner’s FPS stats, but you CAN install this as a standalone application – and it’s also entirely free. You can make some changes to the FPS counter that displays on-screen such as making the font size bigger or smaller, and changing the color of it. Here’s the default (small) size:
One downside of this tool is that, as I touched on earlier, it tries to work out whether you’re gaming or not – and only shows the FPS counter it you “definitely” ARE gaming. It does this by scanning for which game engines might be running. Unfortunately this approach means that it won’t always show up for every game. It did work fine for me in Assassin’s Creed Mirage though as you can see – I have a simple FPS counter appearing in the top left of my screen. It also appeared for me in an older Serious Sam game, so it’s good to know that it CAN work reliably both for new and old games. I quite like the look of this FPS counter too, but naturally you can configure the exact location and size of this font if you want to.
And that pretty much wraps up this video. Which FPS counter did you prefer the most? Please let me know down in the comments. I quite like AMD’s one for simplicity, but the paid-for FPS Monitor tool if I want some extra stats. I hope you enjoyed this video, if you did please click the thumbs up button and please subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching!
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