For Skyrim players looking to optimize their gaming experience and monitor their in-game performance, tracking their frames-per-second (FPS) is crucial. Having a clear understanding of your FPS allows you to make necessary adjustments to improve your gameplay’s smoothness and overall quality. Since Skyrim doesn’t have a built-in FPS monitor, tracking it is complicated but not impossible. Due to that, we’ve decided to create this guide to show you how to display your FPS in Skyrim.
You can display your FPS in Skyrim using a built-in Steam FPS monitor, a third-party program, Xbox Game Bar, and even your graphics card driver. Most of these utilities allow you to pick between the in-depth version of the tracker and the more compact version that displays the most basic info, such as FPS, temperature, and memory usage.
Now that we’ve covered that you can track your FPS in Skyrim, it’s time to see how. If you’re interested in your monitoring options and want to find out more, stay with us and keep reading!
Displaying your FPS in Skyrim via Steam
Since Skyrim doesn’t have an FPS monitor, and most people play Skyrim on Steam, good chances are, displaying FPS via Steam is your best approach. To display your FPS in Skyrim via Steam, follow these steps:
- Go to Steam settings.
- Navigate to the “In-Game” options.
- Navigate to the “In-Game FPS Counter” option and choose the preferred position of the FPS counter on your screen from the drop-down menu.
This is the least effort solution to your troubles, but Steam’s FPS counter does have some drawbacks. Due to its size and color, it can easily get lost in the game’s visuals. Luckily there is a high-contrast option to improve the counter’s visibility.
Steam’s FPS counter is a bare-bones option, but it’s something, and it’s convenient for people playing Skyrim on Steam who don’t want to install third-party programs.
Displaying FPS via a third-party program
There are a plethora of monitoring programs online. I use MSI Afterburner, so I will give you a quick walkthrough on enabling performance monitoring in Afterburner.
- Click on the “settings button.”
- In the monitoring tab, select which properties you want tracked. You can choose everything from GPU temperature and FPS to fan speed and memory clock.
- Now move to the “On-screen display” tab and select which key will serve as a toggle for your “On-screen” display.
- Save the settings and launch the game.
MSI afterburner (and other similar monitors) give you a better perspective on the performance of your game since it can monitor all hardware aspects of your system, not just FPS. If you’re interested only in your FPS, I wouldn’t recommend downloading a third-party program; however, in that case, I’m sure Steam’s counter is perfectly fine.
Monitoring your FPS in Skyrim via your graphics card software
Both Nvidia graphics cards and AMD graphics cards come with software that allows you to fine-tune your graphics settings and monitor various aspects of your hardware. Since I’m using GeForce Experience, I can give you a detailed step-by-step guide on enabling the FPS counter in this program. For AMD users, I’m sure the process is similar. All you need to do is search through the settings of AMD Radeon software.
- Open the GeForce Experience overlay by pressing ALT+Z in-game.
- Navigate to the “performance” option.
- A sidebar will appear with the complete overview of the current state of your card. You can toggle the more compact version of the tracker by pressing ALT+R.
You can choose what information you want displayed, but the preset counter should be more than enough for people looking for only an FPS monitor.
Using Xbox Gamebar to display FPS
If none of the solutions works for you, you can always rely on good ol’ Xbox Gamebar. To display FPS in Xbox Gamebar, follow these steps.
- Press Windows key+G to turn on the Gamebar overlay.
- In the bottom left corner, the screen should be a “performance” tab that you can interact with. This section shows you in-depth stats related to your hardware, such as CPU usage, GPU usage, FPS, and VRAM.
- You can pin this tab so it’s always present and even toggle between compact and more detailed modes.
The size and position of the Xbox Gamebar FPS monitor can be changed, just like the info it provides.
