Showing FPS in Unreal Engine

There isn’t a more immediate indication of the overall performance of your project than its framerate. Although it doesn’t provide a lot of context as to the how or why your game might be underperforming, keeping an eye on your fps allows you to catch any strange behaviour before your project gets too far along and the optimization process becomes that much harder to address.

The simplest way to display your Unreal project’s framerate is by selecting the ‘Show FPS’ option within the viewport’s hamburger menu, or by using the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+H. You could also use the ‘stat fps’ console command, which achieves the same thing.

Unreal provides a wide range of performance-related console commands that display useful engine statistics to help you optimize your game. Let’s run through a few of these windows into the engine’s vitals, explore how they can be interpreted, and break down why all of this is so important.

Toggling the FPS Display

Your fps readout is your faithful companion for the lifecycle of your project, and it’s important to get into the habit of checking it regularly as you add new content.

Whether you’re using Unreal 4 or 5, the fastest way to see your fps within the Editor is to press the Ctrl+Shift+H shortcut, or select Show FPS from the hamburger menu found in the top left of your viewport. This will display your current frames per second as well as the time in milliseconds it took to render the previous frame.

If you’re running your project in a New Editor Window or in a packaged build the viewport menus will not be available, and you’ll need to enter stat fps as a console command.

Fortunately you won’t need to do this every time you hit play as the state of the debug ‘stat’ readouts will persist until you restart the engine.

Setting up a quick shortcut using an Execute Console Command Node in your Pawn or Player Controller (or perhaps Game Mode if you’re just looking to run this on the server) is a quick and easy way to toggle the FPS Display mid-game with a single button press.

If you’re looking to just be able to see fps data from within the Editor, you can also enable the Titlebar Statistics via the Editor Preferences. Just look for the Show Frame Rate and Memory checkbox within the Performance section. Check out this tip from Unreal Directive for further details.

Interpreting the FPS Display

If your game is running at all well your FPS Display is probably updating at a speed so blindingly fast that it can be difficult to read. To help with legibility the engine will automatically tint the text based on a few simple thresholds.

Color	Range
Green	Greater than/equal to 29.5
Yellow	Less than 29.5, greater than 20
Red	Less than/equal to 20

You may have noticed that these colors are calibrated to the industry standard of 30fps most commonly found on consoles. Some people (myself included) would argue that in most cases a framerate of 30 is a minimum viable value rather than a standard to aim for, but unfortunately as far as I’m aware it’s not possible to tweak these color bands to better suit a more aggressive performance target without making changes to the the engine’s source code.

Stat Commands

Your framerate is an excellent gauge of the moment-to-moment performance of your game, but it’s also the last link in a long chain of calculation where a single value can only tell you so much about what’s happening behind the scenes. To properly unpack the how and the why you’ll need some additional information. This is where the inbuilt ‘stat’ console commands come in handy.

You can access these commands within the Editor via the viewport hamburger menu, and this is a really useful way to see which ones are available. The tooltips will often (but not always) provide further context as to how they work.

There are a lot of stat commands, and they can get really specific about the performance-related information they display. I’ve compiled a short list of those I find most useful, in order of their informational complexity. I’ve also tried to include a brief description of what each will tell you about your game’s performance. Most of these can be used at the same time and will not overlap/interfere with each other.

stat fps

The same as pressing Ctrl+Shift+H, this command displays your game’s current framerate in frames per second as well as the time in milliseconds (ms) that it took for the previous frame to be generated. This is a common and unobtrusive way to gauge the performance of your game but doesn’t provide much context.

stat unit

The stat unit command adds an additional readout immediately beneath your FPS Display that provides more information on previous frame time.

The stat fps readout (left) and with stat unit also enabled.

The Frame value at the top is the total time it took for the previous frame to render, the same information that is displayed by stat fps. The other values show the render time for the Game and Draw (rendering) threads, as well as a bunch of other useful information.

Check out Unreal Directive’s breakdown of Stat Unit for a succinct explanation of these values and what each can tell us about our game’s performance. They have done a great job of breaking down each value and what they represent.

Stat unit is a super useful command when you’re looking to narrow down why your game might be running poorly, as you’ll be able to see where the bulk of the frame time is being consumed. For example, if your Draw value is relatively high then your game is likely bottlenecked by the render thread.

stat unitgraph

The stat unitgraph command is similar to stat unit, except that it also adds a graph in the bottom left of your viewport that plots these values over time, making it easier to identify spikes in your frame time.

It’s important to note that the information presented by stat fps, stat unit and stat unitgraph is filtered, with the engine providing the average value over a period of approximately 10 frames. If you want to see the unfiltered information you should use the command stat raw.

Other stat commands

There are a lot of stat commands, and they cover a huge range of different engine features. The ones we’ve looked at today have all been from within the Engine category, but there are many more that offer different approaches to monitoring the health of your project.

Some others you may want to check out include:

• stat engine (a more in-depth version of stat unit)
• stat gpu (GPU statistics)
• stat cpuload (CPU utilization)
• stat streaming (Texture streaming information – I wrote a whole guide on how to interpret this one!)

Sharing framerate information with your players

There may come a time where you want to share performance data with your players, or perhaps just like to view the FPS Display within a shipping build where debug console commands and their associated screen messages have all been disabled.

To achieve this you’ll need to create a User Widget that reads and then interprets the delta between each rendered frame. As luck would have it, I’ve written a tutorial on achieving just that.

I hope you find it useful!

Improving your framerate

A love/hate relationship with the framerate counter is a mainstay of the game development experience. If you’ve just toggled your FPS Display on for the first time and discovered some nasty surprises it might be time to look at further optimizing your project.

Unfortunately a breakdown of how to optimize your game and reduce your framerate is well beyond the scope of this article, but you’re in luck. There is no shortage of both written and video tutorials on the subject of optimization. Here are a few I found to be useful primers to jump into the topic.

• Testing and Optimizing Your Content
• Profiler Tool Reference
• Maximizing Your Game’s Performance in Unreal Engine