FPS Test

An FPS test — also called a frame rate test or FPS counter — measures how many frames per second something renders; in this case, a canvas animation running live in your browser tab. Pick a load level above and this tool counts real rendered frames each second, showing your current rate, a running average, the 1% low (your worst moments, which matter more for perceived smoothness than the average), and frame time in milliseconds. It's a quick, no-download way to see how your browser and hardware handle rendering work, and to compare before/after changes like closing background tabs or updating a graphics driver.

What the Load Levels Actually Do

• Idle — No particles rendered; the counter mostly reflects your display's refresh rate, since there's nothing forcing frames to be skipped.
• Light (300 particles) — A small amount of continuous rendering work, enough to separate a modern machine from a very old or low-power one.
• Medium (1,500 particles) — A moderate load most current laptops and desktops should hold near their monitor's refresh rate without much drop.
• Heavy (4,000 particles) — Starts to reveal real differences between integrated and dedicated graphics, and between browsers with and without hardware acceleration enabled.
• Extreme (9,000 particles) — A deliberately excessive load meant to find where your specific setup starts to struggle, not a realistic everyday scenario.

FPS vs. Refresh Rate: Why Your Number Might Look Capped

Frame rate (FPS) is how many frames your browser actually produces per second; refresh rate (Hz) is how many times your monitor can display a new image per second. Browsers tie their rendering loop to requestAnimationFrame, which is throttled to match your display's refresh rate by default — so on a standard 60Hz monitor, this test won't climb meaningfully above 60 FPS at Idle no matter how fast your GPU is, since there's nowhere for the extra frames to go. If you want to isolate that number specifically, the dedicated Refresh Rate Test does exactly that with no render load involved. Where this FPS test becomes useful is at higher load levels, where real rendering work can push your actual frame rate below your display's ceiling — that gap is the interesting signal.

Why the 1% Low Matters More Than the Average

A high average FPS can hide short, sharp drops that are exactly what your eyes and reflexes actually notice — a brief stutter during a fast camera pan or a busy on-screen moment. The 1% low tracks the average of your worst-performing one percent of samples, which is why hardware reviewers lean on it instead of a plain average when comparing GPUs: two systems can post the same average FPS while one feels noticeably choppier because its worst moments are far below its average. A tight gap between your average and your 1% low generally means smoother, more consistent motion than a wide one, even at the same average number.

Why This Isn't a Direct Substitute for an In-Game Benchmark

This test renders 2D shapes on an HTML canvas through the browser's own compositor, which is a meaningfully different graphics pipeline than a native game engine drawing 3D geometry, textures, shaders, and lighting through DirectX, Vulkan, or Metal directly against your GPU driver. A browser also carries overhead a native game doesn't — tab sandboxing, JavaScript execution, and whatever else is running in other open tabs. Treat the number here as a relative, same-machine comparison (before and after closing background apps, switching browsers, or updating a graphics driver) rather than a stand-in for the FPS counter you'd see in an actual game.

What Actually Affects Your Score

If you're using this as a repeatable FPS checker or benchmark — say, testing before and after a driver update — a few things outside the load level itself shift the number you see. Hardware acceleration matters a lot — Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all hand canvas and compositing work off to your GPU by default, but that setting can be disabled manually or blocked by outdated graphics drivers, forcing everything through slower CPU-only software rendering. Integrated GPUs (built into the CPU, common in laptops and budget desktops) generally hold up fine at Light and Medium load but fall off faster than a dedicated graphics card once you hit Heavy or Extreme. Power-saving modes on laptops — both Windows' battery saver and macOS's Low Power Mode — deliberately cap CPU/GPU clock speeds to save battery, which shows up here as lower and less consistent frame rates than the same laptop plugged in. Browser extensions that inject scripts into every page, several other tabs playing video or animating in the background, and a significant number of open programs competing for RAM can all shave frames off the total as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Tools

Check your display's actual Hz with no render load using the Refresh Rate Test, check for pixel-response trailing with the Ghosting Test, or see how fast your mouse reports position with the Mouse Polling Rate Test.