How to tell FPS in games without performance drop?

So I need a program like FRAPS or something that can tell me the FPS of my games. Sure fraps works, but i notice a good 15% drop in FPS when using it. Any programs that won't f*** up my performance?

i think razers gameboost software has a built in frame counter

I don't notice anything with MSI Afterburner

Fraps doesn't bother with your performance unless you are recording. How can you tell there's a 15% drop in FPS if fraps is the only program you have used?

Because i ran a game i had a bit of issues with(Saints Row 3) and it was playable but barely but with fraps it was choppy and stuttering at 25 fps but without it it didn't have those problems. And no i was not recording.

I don't see a FPS drop when I'm not recording with fraps... let alone 15%, which would be highly noticeable for me as I use a really old laptop most of the time, so your specs (thus performance) should be better than that. Other programs I've found to work are MSI afterburner and just using the console to bring up the fps counter in game... no really most games have troubleshooting and development tools built in, just only a few have the option in the menu for them.

Know where i can get this? I have a MSI graphics card so that shouldn't be a problem.

MSI's website, its free and works on even non-msi cards... although personally I prefer the NVIDIA performance suite.

If you use f12 in frps, to activate the overlay, it doesnt mess with framerate. you may be accidentally mistaking the hotkey for the recording one.

everyone saying fraps won't affect performance has never used it on a low end system, while 15% does sound high it will certainly give a drastically noticeable performance hit on a weak machine

can't give real numbers for obvious reasons

Ive only heard of Fraps causing an FPS drop if its recording, never when imply doing an overlay. I believe it uses the same Overlay base as Riva and the likes, which is every overlay software.

My machine is a N50vc from Asus... its a older laptop with a Intel Core2Duo T9400 and NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS. Simply put its a steaming heap by now, for gaming it'll barely run KSP or Minecraft on lowest settings, however I have owned it more than five years now and I got it on sale when they where introducing its replacement to the market, so i can't say I'm surprised its outdated. However what I can say is I have never, ever witnessed a slowdown running fraps without recording, benchmarking or other similar features, it simply doesn't happen. What does happen is about a 15% reduction in FPS when recording.. plus some lag spikes when I overfill the ram during recording, but this is normally only and issue for games with many mods.

So while I can't speak for everyone here... yes some of us do both use fraps and a low end system, no we aren't deliberately misleading people, my experience is no slowdown, maybe on some systems a slowdown will occur, but this is probably a sign of a driver issue or incorrect settings, fraps itself shouldn't use any resources to speak of when not recording, certainly less than background tasks you'll have run now and again such as antivirus or some software updaters.

Hm, I'm not sure then. I've only experienced slow downs while recording. Have you tried other software? Give MSI Afterburner and/or Bandicam a try. Also, some games have a fps counter built-in.