Calculating Frame Rate

Last Updated 2/23/06

Whether you need to know what frame rate your game can run at, or you're just wondering how much juice you can get out of SDL's rendering, knowing how to calculate frame rate is a useful skill. This tutorial will teach you to make a simple frames per second test.

//Keep track of the frame count int frame = 0; //Timer used to calculate the frames per second Timer fps; //Timer used to update the caption Timer update;

Here are the 3 key variables in our frames per second test. "frame" keeps track of how many frames have been rendered. "fps" is the timer that keeps track of how much time that has been spent rendering. "update" is the timer that we use to update the caption, which is where we show the frames per second.

//Start the update timer update.start(); //Start the frame timer fps.start(); //While the user hasn't quit while( quit == false ) {

After everything has been initialized and loaded, we start the timers then enter the main loop.

//While there's events to handle while( SDL_PollEvent( &event ) ) { //If the user has Xed out the window if( event.type == SDL_QUIT ) { //Quit the program quit = true; } }

There's no advanced event handling here, we just deal with the user wanting to X out.

//Apply the surface apply_surface( 0, 0, image, screen ); //Update the screen if( SDL_Flip( screen ) == -1 ) { return 1; } //Increment the frame counter frame++;

After we handle events, we apply the surface, update the screen, then increment the frame counter.

//If a second has passed since the caption was last updated if( update.get_ticks() > 1000 ) { //A temp string char caption[ 64 ]; //Calculate the frames per second and create the string sprintf( caption, "Frames Per Second: %f", (float)frame / ( fps.get_ticks() / 1000.f ) ); //Reset the caption SDL_WM_SetCaption( caption, NULL ); //Restart the update timer update.start(); } }

Here is where we show the frames per second.

First we check if it has been at least one second since the caption has last been updated.

If it is time to update the caption, we create a temporary string, and put the FPS in the string.

Frames per second is calculated by taking the amount of frames rendered divided by the time it took to render them (in seconds).

After that we update the caption, and restart the update timer.

Download the media and source code for this tutorial .