With many people showing of gameplay videos and streaming games, an FPS counter like Fraps is nice to have to show off your smooth gaming experience but presenting a graph of your frames-per-second is a more sophisticated method and is a nice way to show the consistency of your performance. For us benchmark enthusiasts, its also a nice way to narrow down which area of a game causes performance spikes or drops.
As of version 4.4.0 Beta 11, Afterburner will now allow users to plot graph overlays on their games to make benchmarking easier. In this article we’ll show you how to enable graphs in MSI Afterburner.
First step is to install MSI Afterburner with RivaTuner Statistics Server. The application is available for download from Guru3D and is conveniently packaged together. Download the latest version here. Install like any other application and do note that RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS) will ask to be installed midway through installation.
- Once installed, open MSI Afterburner.
- The look will vary but click on Settings or the little gear icon on the app.
- It will bring up the Settings menu.
- Click the monitoring tab at the top of the window.
- In the monitoring tab, you’ll see all the parameters that you can meter including CPU and GPU frequencies, CPU and GPU temps, how much VRAM and RAM is being used, etc. and of course FPS, frametimes, and frame percentiles. You’d have to enable them first via clicking on Show in On-Screen Display. You can now choose the overlay appears if you just want it text or graph or both.
- The graph will appear in games as seen below and can work in tandem with Fraps. For advanced users, you have options so you can further customize the graph with colors and text.
- You can bring up RTSS to change the display option of the overlay.
- These options allow you to increase and decrease size as well as reposition the chart/graphs. Do note that some game support this a little weird and may be off on your chosen position.
- Once setup, you’ll have a nice overlay of FPS and other detail you want to see for your performance to showcase or test your games.
There are some games that may have this built into the game itself but those are few and far part. If you want to monitor your game and benchmarks performance for testing or other purposes, showing them off in graphs is a great way to do it and is a very scientific way of monitor stutters or lag in-game.
Most of our benchmark videos will use these overlay to show you guys actual performance in games we test.
Let us know in the comments if you have questions about using MSI Afterburner.
This is an update to our previous article How to Enable Graphs in Afterburner.