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How to turn on the Steam FPS counter

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A person running Steam on the M4 MacBook Pro. Rocket League is up on the screen
Chris Hagan / Digital Trends

How many frames per second (FPS) your PC or laptop can hit can make or break even the best PC games. Too low, and the game will feel like a jittery mess. Some people have a keen eye for spotting a game's FPS, but even then, it is hard to tell in the middle of a multiplayer game or cross-platform game. Thankfully, Steam has a built-in feature that can show you exactly how your rig is holding up while playing and help you decide if you need to change some settings, especially with some of the intensive upcoming PC games. Here's how to quickly turn on Steam's FPS counter.

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Difficulty

Easy

Duration

5 minutes

What You Need

  • Steam

A dynamic collection in Steam.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

How to turn on Steam's FPS counter

Because Steam has this feature as part of the launcher itself, it will work on any game you can run through Steam. It only takes a second to turn on or off, but you do need to do it before launching a game.

Step 1: Launch Steam and click on Steam in the top left corner.

The Steam homepage settings.
Valve

Step 2: Choose Settings.

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Step 3: Choose In-game and then scroll down to find the In-game FPS counter drop-down.

The steam in-game settings.
Valve

Step 4: Choose if you want the FPS counter to be displayed on either the top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right corner of your screen.

Step 5: You can also toggle on the High contrast color switch if you would rather the numbers be red as opposed to gray.

As soon as you boot up your next game, the current FPS will be displayed wherever you chose until you go back into the settings and turn it off.

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Jesse Lennox
Jesse Lennox
Jesse Lennox has been a writer at Digital Trends for over four years and has no plans of stopping. He covers all things…
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