You want a number in the corner of the screen. A patch made a game feel worse and you want to know whether that is real, or a friend asked what you get and you had no idea. Several counters are already built into software you may have: Steam has one, Windows has one, NVIDIA's and AMD's apps have one each, some games have their own, and Intel publishes a free tool. Turning one on takes a minute. Reading it correctly takes a little longer, and that part is at the end of this page.
Steam: the performance monitor
In June 2025 Valve added a performance monitor that Steam draws over your game. Open Steam's Settings > In Game and find the performance monitor's settings; that is where you choose the level of detail, the position, the size and the hotkey. Valve's FAQ explains each number it shows.
There are four levels, from a single FPS value, which Valve describes as similar to the old FPS counter, up to full CPU, GPU and RAM details, with optional graphs of frame rate over time and of each CPU core's load. Two of its features are easy to miss. It can show the slowest and fastest single frame, not only a rate, and it can separate frames generated by DLSS or FSR from the frames the game actually rendered.
Some values depend on your hardware; GPU temperature, for example, appears only on cards Steam can read it from.
Xbox Game Bar: the Performance widget
Windows has its own. Press Windows logo key + G to open Game Bar, then select Widget menu > Performance. Microsoft's guide lists what the widget shows: CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM and FPS, with the FPS tab showing the current frame rate and a history of the past 60 seconds.
The FPS tab needs Game Bar version 3.34.11002.0 or later, which you can update from the Microsoft Store, and a one-time permission step:
- In the Performance widget, choose the FPS tab and press Request access.
- Follow the prompts.
- Restart the PC.
If Request access is still there after the restart, the step did not complete. It works by adding your account to the Performance Log Users group, which needs your account to be the device's administrator, or an administrator to add you. To check, type Computer Management into the search box and open Local Users and Groups > Groups > Performance Log Users; if your account is not listed, request access again and restart. If you pinned the widget and the number looks stale, open Game Bar once with Windows logo key + G to refresh it.
If Windows logo key + G opens nothing at all, w0a's Game Bar / game capture repair card puts Game Bar back to the Windows default.
NVIDIA: the NVIDIA app overlay
On a GeForce card, the NVIDIA app's overlay shows performance statistics on desktop and laptop GeForce RTX and GTX 600 series and newer. First check that In-Game Overlay is on in the app under Settings > Features. Then, in a game, with the default shortcuts:
- Alt+R shows or hides the statistics.
- Alt+Shift+R cycles through different metrics.
- Alt+Z opens the overlay, where Statistics > Configure heads-up display sets what is shown.
AMD: the metrics overlay in AMD Software
On a Radeon card with the full installation of AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, AMD's instructions are to type "Metrics" into the search box in AMD Software and open Performance Metrics. On its Overlay tab, Show Metrics Overlay turns the on-screen display on. The default hotkeys are Ctrl+Shift+O for the overlay and Ctrl+Shift+L for logging; search "Hotkey" and open Hotkey Settings to change them.
Two details are easy to miss. The metric list goes beyond frame rate to frame time, a 99th-percentile FPS figure and a stutter rate. And logging writes the run to a file, by default under AppData\Local\AMD\CN in your user folder, so you can compare runs later. The sampling interval is adjustable from 0.25 to 5 seconds, which is also a reminder that the overlay shows one reading per interval, not every frame.
Intel: PresentMon
Intel publishes PresentMon, a free overlay and capture tool, open source on GitHub, that measures the frames of DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan applications on Windows. Intel describes it as multi-vendor, so it is not limited to Arc cards. Its overlay shows live graphs, and its capture writes every frame's timing to a CSV file, which makes it a measuring tool as much as a counter.
CS2: the Telemetry HUD
Counter-Strike 2 has its own. Valve's Telemetry HUD is under Settings > Game > Telemetry. Each element can be set to never show, always show, or show only when conditions are "poor", and you set the threshold that counts as poor; past it, the value turns red. Valve added it in February 2024, in the same update that deleted the old cq_netgraph commands.
The two numbers are different measurements. The one on the right is your average FPS. The one on the left, in ms, is the slowest frame time in a recent window, which is why the two are often not reciprocals of each other. Valve's suggestion is to set the frame-time warning slightly above the maximum you normally see: when a hitch happens, you can then tell whether it was a performance problem on your PC rather than the network. CS2 low FPS and stutter is the next step from there.
What the number cannot tell you
A counter answers one question: roughly how many frames per second the game delivered over the last moment. That is enough to spot a setting that costs a lot, a frame cap you forgot about, or a game running far below where it used to. Everything else needs more than a glance.
- It is an average over a window. Steam's monitor reports frame rate over one-second intervals, AMD's overlay samples every 0.25 to 5 seconds, and CS2 labels its FPS figure an average. One 50 ms frame in a second of 5 ms frames moves a 200 FPS reading to about 191: the counter barely changes, while that one frame lasted ten times as long as its neighbours. High average FPS but bad 1% lows explains why the slow frames are the ones to read.
- It may count frames the game never rendered. With frame generation on, most software includes the generated frames in its FPS figure, Valve's FAQ notes, yet frame generation "can't help with things like input latency". Steam's monitor can show the two apart; a figure that mixes them does not tell you how quickly the game responds. DLSS, FSR and XeSS explained covers why.
- Two counters can disagree about the same moment, because they average over different windows. They are also software with bugs of their own: Valve's September 2025 update fixed its monitor overcounting by one frame in some V-Sync or frame-capped situations.
- It does not tell you why. A low number has many possible causes, and a frame rate alone cannot tell a GPU at its limit from a CPU that cannot keep it fed. GPU not at 100% is the page for that.
Measuring a change: record a run instead
If you want to know whether a change made a difference, a counter you glance at is the wrong instrument. Record frame times over a whole run and compare runs: PresentMon's capture and AMD's logging both write to a file, and w0a's Benchmark page reads frame times from the graphics stack itself rather than from an overlay hooked into the game. Play the same scene before and after, more than once each, and compare the lows rather than the average; reading the benchmark covers what each number means.
What does not help
- Comparing your number with someone else's. A different scene, resolution, driver or averaging window makes the two figures incomparable. Compare your own runs, and play them the same way: a run spent looking at a wall and a run spent in a fight are not comparable either.
- One run each way. Two runs of an unchanged setup never match exactly, so a single pair of runs cannot separate a real change from that noise.
Related
- High average FPS but bad 1% lows
- Reading the benchmark
- DLSS, FSR and XeSS: upscaling and frame generation explained
- CS2 low FPS and stutter
- Should you cap your FPS?
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