See Your Games Frame Rates Using Fraps

Have you ever wondered what your frame rate (FPS) is while you are playing games? Well just like most other things there is a small free program that can do this for you and it is called: Fraps. You can download your free copy of Fraps from here: http://www.fraps.com/. If you are wondering what all of this talk about frame rate (Fps) is you can visit this wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate#Frame_rates_in_video_games. That page can explain it in a lot more detail than I would be able to.

Now all that you will need to do is install the program after you have downloaded it. You will then need to run it and the main window should look like something similar to the image below.

Fraps Main Screen

Once you have Fraps open you will have a couple options on the main screen like to start the program minimized to the system tray, or keep the Fraps window on top of all other windows, and also a option to start Fraps when Windows starts.

Fraps Icon In The System Tray

If you then goto the FPS tab you can change some settings in there too if you would like to but most of those options are fine the way they are unless you prefer them to be different. The one option that you may want to change is where the frame rate will be shown in your gaming window. You can do this by clicking on the little circles in the Overlay Corner portion or the Fraps window.

Overlay Corner

In the Movies tab there really isn't much that you will really need to change either. You may want to change where your output video will be saved though. This can be done by just clicking on the Change button toward the top of the window on the right side. You will then need to browse to where you want your movies to be saved.

Changing Directory Of Saved Movies

Now in the Screenshots tab you may want to change a couple of different things. You can change the output directory just like you can with the movies, but you can also now change what file format you want the pictures to be in (you can only do this is you get the full version). You can change them to: BMP, JPG, PNG, or TGA. You can change the output format by selection the button next to the option you want. You can also put a check in the box that says Include Frate Rate Overlay On Screenshots so that the frate rate will show up in your screenshots.

Screenshot File Output Options

That is an overview of just the main options that you have while using this program. Now to see your frame rate in your games you will just need to keep Fraps running and then just start up the game that you would like to play. You should then be able to see your frame rate in one of the corners that you selected.

In Game Screenshot

Screenshot from the game Combat Arms which is a free First-Person Shooter and can be downloaded from here: http://combatarms.nexon.net/Intro.aspx