The FPS overlay

The FPS overlay is a small, always-on-top window that shows your live FPS, frame time, 1% lows, CPU, GPU, RAM, ping and temperatures while you play. It's measured the anti-cheat-safe way — no DirectX hooks, no injection — and it's free in every tier.

Turning it on

There are two ways to toggle the overlay:

Press the global hotkey Ctrl+Shift+F from anywhere, including inside a game.
Open the FPS Overlay page and click Show Overlay / Hide Overlay.

The page shows the current state (Visible or Hidden) and a live preview card so you can see your styling before it appears on screen.

Guardian (Pro) can auto-show the overlay when it detects an emulator and auto-hide it when no emulator is running — so it appears exactly when you're gaming without you touching anything.

How the FPS number is measured

BRUTAL reads the real display present rate using Windows' D3DKMT statistics — the same kind of present-count counter a frame-rate tool uses, with no graphics-API hooks and no code injected into your game. That keeps it safe with anti-cheat.

Crucially, the FPS only shows a number while a game or emulator is actually detected. When nothing is running, the overlay shows a dash ("—") rather than inventing a fake frame rate — that's the honest behaviour the whole product is built around. While the counter is priming you may briefly see "Measuring…".

One real limitation to know: this hook-free method reports the primary display's present rate. That equals your game's FPS in fullscreen-exclusive mode, but in borderless/windowed/composited modes it tends to read close to your monitor's refresh rate. That's a trade-off of staying anti-cheat-safe — and BRUTAL is upfront about it rather than pretending otherwise.

What else it shows

Alongside FPS, the overlay can display CPU usage, GPU usage, RAM usage and temperatures. The GPU figure sums all 3D engine instances (the way Task Manager does), so it reflects real load rather than one idle process reading zero.

Customising the overlay

On the FPS Overlay page you can adjust:

Position — Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Left or Bottom Right
Background opacity — a slider from transparent to solid
Font size and font color — eight preset swatches plus a custom hex box
Which stats to show — toggle FPS, frame time, 1% lows, CPU, GPU, RAM, ping and temperatures independently

Changes apply to the live overlay immediately and are saved, so they persist across restarts and however you next open the overlay (hotkey, page button, or Guardian auto-show).

How to use it

Open the FPS Overlay page and set your position, color, opacity and which stats to show.
Launch your game.
Press Ctrl+Shift+F to show the overlay; press it again to hide.
If the FPS shows a dash, that just means no game/emulator is detected yet.

Common issues / troubleshooting

Ctrl+Shift+F does nothing. Another app may already own that hotkey, so registration failed. Use the Show Overlay button on the FPS Overlay page instead.
FPS shows "—" or "No game." That's expected when no game or emulator is running — BRUTAL won't show a number it can't honestly attribute to a game. Start your game and the number appears.
FPS reads near my refresh rate even in-game. You're likely in borderless/windowed mode. Switch the game to fullscreen-exclusive for a true present-rate reading.
I can't see the overlay. Check it isn't behind the game window, try a different corner via Position, and raise the background opacity so it stands out.

To see the same live stats in a larger dashboard, the Home page and Hardware Monitor show CPU/GPU/RAM with graphs. For per-game tuning, see Game profiles (mobile games) and PC games: scanning and per-game settings.

The ping reading

The overlay’s ping carries how it was taken: R when it is a relayed re-measure through Smart Route, T when your network blocked ICMP and it was timed by a TCP connect instead. Those are not the same measurement as a direct ping, so the overlay labels them rather than printing one number as if they were. It only calls an endpoint the game’s server when the title’s published server ranges confirm it — otherwise it says so.