How to Check FPS (Frames per Second)

High FPS is something we all aspire to when it comes to our gaming rigs. Especially when you have it hooked up to a high refresh rate monitor like the CORSAIR XENEON 27QHD240 OLED which offers a maximum refresh rate of 240Hz. To make the most of a monitor like this, your rig needs to be able to push as many frames per second as possible.

Finding the best balance of image quality and performance can be a bit of a task, and to make your life easier, you will want to know how much FPS your system is currently achieving. Luckily, there are several ways to check your FPS while your game is running. In this article we'll show you a few different methods.

Check in the settings of your game of choice and look for a setting that overlays the FPS of the game in real time. In our example we are using Marvel Rivals and there is a setting to show the FPS.

And just like that, you have a nice little unobtrusive overlay that tells you the FPS the game is running at. Now you can play around with all the graphics settings to see if they have a positive or negative effect on the image quality and FPS. Not all developers implement this feature though, so how about a game-agnostic solution?

If you are a gamer, you're sure to have Steam on your PC along with an extensive library of games that you have definitely played. Anyway, did you know, that Steam has a feature in its settings to overlay the FPS of any game you play?

With the Steam window open, simply click on "Steam" and then on "Settings."

Navigate to "In Game" and then in the right column enable the In-game FPS counter. You can choose to display it in any corner of the screen. The standard color of the overlay is gray and therefore not very visible. If you want a higher contrast version of the FPS counter, just enable the option to use a high contrast color. As soon you start up any game, the overlay will be there.

If you watch a lot of PC gaming YouTube channels, you've probably wondered how to get these overlays yourself. The answer is a combination of the MSI Afterburner tool, which not only lets you tweak GPU settings, but also includes the ability to add informative performance overlays with the help of RivaTuner Statistics Server.

After downloading the latest version of the MSI Afterburner, make sure that you also install the RivaTuner Statistics Server during the installation process, as this is required for the overlay to work.

Once installed and running, you will need to make a few settings before the overlay appears in-game. Click on "Settings" in the MSI Afterburner window to open them.

There are a lot of sensors you can select to display performance data for, but for our purpose we will stick to Framerate, Framerate Avg, Framerate 1% Low, Framerate 0.1% Low, and Frametime. This will give you all the information you need about how your game performs.

The mentioned sensors are further down the list. You can drag them to the top of the list to make things easier. Additionally, you can select multiple sensors by holding down Ctrl and then dragging them all at the same time to the top of the list.

Make sure you select the sensors you want to monitor, and by holding down the Ctrl , you can select all of them at the same time. Check the box next to Show in On-Screen Display and next to Override group name. For the group name, call it whatever you want. In our case we chose "FPS" as we aren't very creative.

In our example we also show the Frametime, which we have changed to show as a graph under Show in On-Screen Display.

Once you have everything set up in the monitoring tab, you need to navigate to the On-Screen Display tab and click on "More."

Another window will appear showing the RivaTunerStatisticsServer properties. Here you need to check the box next to Enable benchmark mode to let the tool calculate and display the values for Frametime Avg, Framerate Avg, Framerate 1% Low, and Framerate 0.1% Low.

Make sure that you only minimize MSI Afterburner as well as RivaTuner for the overlay to function properly.

And that is it. There are more ways to display FPS, but these are the easiest and most informative.