Show FPS for Steam Games

By  on  

There's nothing more frustrating to a top gamer (outside of bugs in a game) than dropped frames in a video game.  If you're playing a competitive multiplayer game like PUBG or Fortnite, where up to 100 people are simultaneously competing, dropped frames can be the difference between ecstasy or a bullet between the eyes.

While poor frame rate is usually a reflection of underperforming hardware/software, bad code, or server lag, the first step in identifying poor frame rate is directing Steam to display the frame rate during the game.  Let me show you how to direct Steam to output the frame rate of a game!

Start by going to Settings > In-Game:

Steam FPS Settings

A dropdown under the In-game FPS Counter allows you to position the FPS counter anywhere on the screen; you can even allow high contrast color display of the FPS.  When you open the game, you'll see the FPS displayed in the position you selected.

While there's not much you can do to improve FPS outside of improving your CPU and GPU, it's good to see the FPS at a given time and determine if more can be done to make a game perform!

Recent Features

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Pure CSS Slide Up and Slide Down

    If I can avoid using JavaScript for element animations, I'm incredibly happy and driven to do so.  They're more efficient, don't require a JavaScript framework to manage steps, and they're more elegant.  One effect that is difficult to nail down with pure CSS is sliding up...

  • By
    Vertically Centering with Flexbox

    Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we've long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be.  We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!