How to Show FPS in Games

By Walter Jobs, Technology writer and editor · Published 10 October 2026

There are six ways to put a frame rate on screen, every one of them free, and the right choice depends on what you are trying to find out. If you only want to know roughly how fast a game is running, any of them will do. If you are comparing two settings, trying to prove a stutter exists, or checking whether a figure from a review matches your machine, most of them will mislead you.

Every path below was checked against the vendor’s own current documentation in October 2026, because the single most common defect in guides to this subject is a menu path that was correct three years ago. Where a vendor does not publish a path, we say so instead of writing one from memory.

The short version

Steam, and the two things its monitor does that nothing else does

Valve renamed this feature in 2025, which is why older guides describe something that no longer matches the interface. The announcement: “The In-Game FPS counter is now expanded to become the In-Game Overlay Performance monitor. It can display various more detailed information about frame rates, CPU performance, GPU performance, and more.”

Valve’s own instruction for finding it: “To enable the performance monitor, go to Settings->In Game, and find the Performance Monitor settings and detail level options.” Detail level, screen position, contrast and background opacity all live in that one place. The plain frame rate counter people remember is now the lowest detail level of the same feature.

One thing to set deliberately. There is no hotkey out of the box. Valve: “Default is none, if you want to use a hot-key you must set one.” If you want to toggle it mid-game rather than restarting Steam, assign it now.

Two capabilities here are genuinely unique. The first is how it flags a bad frame: “If you see the ↓Min number turn red, it means we think it’s a meaningful drop, which means less than half the average.” That is a stutter indicator built into a frame rate counter, and it is the fastest way to notice a problem you would otherwise have to capture data to see.

The second is frame generation. Valve states that the monitor “will detect frame generation technology and break down both the DLSS/FSR Frame Gen including FPS and the actual game FPS over 1 second intervals”. If you are running DLSS or FSR frame generation, this is the only overlay on this list that will tell you how many of your frames were rendered and how many were inserted. Those two numbers mean very different things for responsiveness, and a single combined figure hides the distinction.

Valve also notes a design choice worth knowing about when comparing to other tools: “Some other software will show you actual frame times in milliseconds, but we have chosen to convert into FPS to keep the AVG/MIN/MAX in comparable and familiar units.”

NVIDIA: the app, not GeForce Experience

GeForce Experience is finished. NVIDIA’s own notice to the remaining users: “In the near future, we will be switching off critical GeForce Experience web servers, so if you want to continue enhancing your games, apps and experiences please upgrade to the NVIDIA app.” NVIDIA has not published a shutdown date, so we are not going to invent one, but the product page for GeForce Experience now redirects to the NVIDIA app page, which is a fairly firm answer in itself.

In the NVIDIA app there are two shortcuts and they do different things. “By pressing Alt+Z, or the button on the top right of the NVIDIA app window, you’ll open the redesigned NVIDIA Overlay.” That is the overlay interface. The statistics display is separate: “Once configured, all of the information will be displayed in-game, and can be toggled on or off with Alt+R.”

To configure what appears, NVIDIA documents the path as Alt+Z, then Statistics, then Statistics View, with named views including a DLSS one and a Custom one. On metrics, NVIDIA lists “GPU and CPU utilization, FPS 1% Low, and PC and system latency with integrated NVIDIA Reflex Analyzer support”.

That latency support is the reason to use this one over Steam’s if you have a GeForce card. No other free overlay on this list reports a latency figure, and in a game that integrates Reflex those numbers are the only free window into the part of responsiveness that frame rate does not describe.

AMD: two hotkeys, and a caveat about matching other tools

AMD publishes exactly two, and it is worth being precise because guides routinely invent a third: “CTRL + SHIFT + L for Toggle Performance Logging” and “CTRL + SHIFT + O for Toggle Performance Overlay”. The parent Radeon Overlay interface is Alt+R, which AMD states is “enabled by default”.

To choose what it shows, AMD’s instruction is to search inside its own software: “In AMD Software, enter ‘Metrics’ into the search box, and click on the ‘Performance Metrics’ result displayed.” Unlike Valve, AMD publishes the position options explicitly: “Choose from Top Left, Top Right (default), Bottom Left, Bottom Right or Custom (enter X and Y position (px)).”

The metric list is the longest here by a distance, covering frame rate, 99th percentile fps, a stutter rate, GPU and CPU utilisation, clocks, total board power, junction temperature, fan speed, memory use, CPU voltage and current. If you are chasing a thermal or power problem rather than a frame rate one, this is the overlay to use, because it puts cause and symptom in the same corner of the screen.

Two caveats. First, this is a polled sampler, not a per-frame capture: AMD documents a “Sample Interval (s)” adjustable “in 0.25 second increments”. That is why its numbers will not match a frame-time capture tool even on the same run, and why its 99th percentile figure is not comparable to a reviewer’s. Second, AMD’s own documentation has a visible error in it: the metric list reads “Frame Time – Reported in frames per second (FPS)”, which frame time is not. We mention it only so that nobody assumes their eyes are the problem.

Xbox Game Bar: works everywhere, and does not work out of the box

This is the route that works regardless of which graphics card you own, and it is the one almost every guide describes incorrectly, because they omit the setup.

Microsoft’s path: “To use the Performance widget over your game, press Windows logo key + G to open Game Bar, then select Widget menu > Performance.” Then the part that gets left out. The FPS tab will not report anything until you complete three steps Microsoft documents: open the Performance widget, “Choose the FPS tab, then press Request access”, then “Follow the prompts, then restart your PC for the changes to take effect”.

What that request actually does is add your account to a Windows group: “When you set up the FPS counter in Game Bar, your user account will be added to the Performance Log Users group.” If the Request access button is still showing after the reboot, Microsoft’s own check is to open Computer Management and look under Local Users and Groups, Groups, Performance Log Users.

There is a minimum version too: “You’ll need Game Bar version 3.34.11002.0 or later to use the FPS counter.” And one quirk worth knowing, because it produces a convincing-looking wrong answer: if you pin the widget, Microsoft says to reopen Game Bar over the game, because “this will refresh the info in the widget”. A pinned widget can sit there showing stale figures.

That Performance Log Users requirement turns up again below, which is not a coincidence: it is the Windows permission that governs reading performance trace data at all.

Intel PresentMon: the one that answers a different question

If you have reached the point of wanting to know why a game feels bad rather than how fast it runs, this is the tool, and despite the name it is not Intel-only. Intel: “Intel PresentMon works with Intel Arc graphics cards and Intel Core processors, as well as other hardware vendor options.” It covers “DirectX 12, DirectX 11, DirectX 9, OpenGL, and Vulkan”, and it is open source.

What distinguishes it is the depth: “see real-time raw numbers, percentiles, rolling-window averages, and more to understand your gaming experience”. It is not drawing a number on your screen, it is capturing a frame-by-frame record you can then read.

Two of its metrics are worth knowing by name. The first is GPU Busy, which Intel introduced to make the bottleneck legible: it “shows real time CPU + GPU balance and how the resources in your machine are being utilized, allowing you to better evaluate computing bottlenecks in your games”. Intel’s plainer explanation of it: “you can see how much time your GPU is spending doing actual rendering versus sitting idle”. The repo’s formal definitions separate three quantities: GPU Busy is “How long the GPU spent working on this frame”, while GPU Time is “Total amount of time between when GPU started frame and when it finished in milliseconds. The GPU may not have been fully busy during this time.”

The second is the pair it reports instead of one frame rate: “Presented FPS” is the “rate of application calls to a Present() function” and “Displayed FPS” is the “rate of frame change measurable at display”. Those differ in exactly the situation Valve’s monitor was built to expose, and having them as two separate columns is the most precise handling of frame generation available in any free tool.

Two practical notes. It needs the same Windows group as Game Bar: “PresentMon needs to be run by a user who is a member of the ‘Performance Log Users’ user group.” And Intel documents its own accuracy limit, which is the kind of disclosure that should make you trust the rest: GPU execution metrics “are less accurate when running on a system that uses Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling”, with one example reported “~0.5ms larger than the true GPU work duration”.

Intel Arc owners should note one thing before reaching for the driver software instead. Intel’s older Arc Control app, the one with an Alt+I overlay, is finished: “Arc Control is considered End Of Life (EOL), and as such, has no further changes.” The replacement does have an overlay, but Intel states only that it arrived in a specific version, that “Starting with Intel Graphics Software version 26.18.2353.2, a Performance Overlay feature is now available”, and publishes no menu path or hotkey for it. So we are not printing one.

MSI Afterburner, and the anti-cheat problem nobody warns you about

Afterburner itself does not draw the overlay. MSI’s own documentation is clear on this: “To display hardware monitoring data, you need to have ‘RivaTuner Statistics Server’ installed”, and “both MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner Statistics Server must run in the background for you to view monitoring data in games”. RTSS ships inside the Afterburner installer and MSI tells you to tick it during setup. To put a metric on screen you select it in Afterburner’s monitoring list and click “Show in On-Screen Display”.

Now the warning. This is the only route on this list that injects itself into the game, and anti-cheat systems notice. MSI documented a concrete case with Battlefield 6, where the anti-cheat “blocks RTSS version 7.3.5 and earlier from displaying overlays”, resolved by updating RTSS. If your overlay vanishes in one game and works in every other, this is almost always why, and the fix is an RTSS update rather than anything in the game.

Does running an overlay cost you frames?

Everyone asserts an answer. One vendor has published a number, and only because it was fixing a defect. Valve’s beta notes in June 2025: “Improved overlay performance and FPS graph specifically in D3D11 games, if you get 600+ FPS the FPS graph will no longer cause a dip to 200-300 in some D3D11 games.”

Read that as what it is. Valve fixed a bug, and in the process documented that its own frame rate graph was costing more than half the frame rate in some titles above 600 fps. That is not current behaviour and it is not a general claim about overlays. It is the only hard figure anyone publishes, and the honest summary is that the cost is normally too small to see, that nobody except Valve has quantified it, and that the one measured instance was large enough to matter.

Which to use

• Just want the number? Steam if the game is on Steam, Game Bar otherwise. Both are already installed.
• Using DLSS or FSR frame generation? Steam’s monitor or PresentMon, because they separate real frames from generated ones.
• Chasing a stutter? PresentMon. A frame rate counter cannot show you a frame-time spike, and 1% lows is where the numbers it produces get interpreted.
• Suspect heat or power? The AMD overlay on Radeon, Afterburner on anything, so that the temperature and the frame rate are on screen together. Then sudden fps drops for what the pattern means.
• Chasing responsiveness? The NVIDIA app, the only free overlay with latency figures. Context in frame rate and input lag.
• Deciding what to buy? None of these can help with hardware you do not own. That is what the fps calculator is for.