Displaying Your Mac’s Frames Per Second (FPS)

An easy-to-follow guide to display your frame rate while playing games on your Mac

Written by Darlene Antonelli, MA

Last Updated: September 7, 2023

Track your frames per second (FPS) if you want to know how well your computer is handling your gameplay. For example, if you're seeing a staggeringly low FPS (like 5), you should change the game's settings to decrease the graphics settings or try other things to get better FPS. This wikiHow article teaches you how to see FPS when you're gaming on a Mac.

Things You Should Know

Using Steam to show FPS for Mac games is the only reliable method to track your framerate.
Go to "Steam > Preferences > In-Game > In-Game FPS Counter" and make your selection.
Restart Steam and launch your game to see the FPS.

Steps

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1
Launch Steam. You'll find this program in your Applications folder in Finder.
- If you don't have the desktop app, you can download and install it for free from https://store.steampowered.com/about/.
- You'll be able to use the In-game FPS counter in all your Steam games and maybe non-Steam games. You can add a game you purchased from somewhere else to your Steam library, and the FPS counter may or may not display.^{[1]
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2
Click Steam. You'll see this in the upper left corner of the application window.
- If a Steam program window is not open, you can right-click (or control-click) the Steam icon in the top menu bar.
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You'll see this at the bottom of the menu.
You'll see this on the left side of the Preferences window.
" You'll see this in the middle of the window.
You can choose to display the current FPS in the top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right of your screen.
The Preferences window will disappear.
You want to restart it to apply your changes.
You'll now see the FPS displayed in the position you chose earlier.^{[2]
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Tips

Steam looks like the only reliable option. You can try using Count It to see your FPS, but it hasn't been updated since 2020, is no longer being developed, and may no longer work.^{[3]
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Some games, like Rise of the Tomb Raider, have a built-in benchmark feature that you can activate to see your highest, lowest, and average FPS in different scenarios.

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Quartz Debug works for older Macs (those made around 2015), but since newer Macs use different graphics and encoding, it no longer works.

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