Thanks Reddit – This New FPS & System Monitor Is Amazing

A post on Reddit 4 daysshowed off a really cool, sleek and minimalistFPS/system stat counter.

Thanks to the power of Reddit, u/Violetmars and u/SlimDoodlaunched this tool last night.

Soin this videoI show offClean Meter. I show how to set it up, how it looks, what customization options it has, and I also discuss any bugs/flaws that it has.

Please note thatright now, Clean Meter requires that you have the following running and configured:

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! A lot of FPS monitoring tools out there aren’t very good. Maybe they’re big and clunky, or it’s hard to actually read the data they’re trying to show you. Or they’re not very customizable, or they just don’t look very minimalist and sleek, which sometimes you want. They get in your face a bit too much when you’re gaming.

But luckily, the power of Reddit has done it again! A user by the name of Violet Mars posted a sleek design concept for new FPS tracking software 4 days ago. Then last night, they posted that it has come to fruition because they worked with another Reddit user called Slim Dood, who is a Portuguese developer in real life by the name of Danilo (sorry if I’m mispronouncing that name). Basically, they actually worked together and launched this bit of software, which you can download and try out. I’ve been trying it out all morning, so I wanted to walk through the pros and cons of it and show off why I’m actually really excited about this software.

Enter CleanMeter

This software is called Clean Meter, and one of the reasons I’m really excited about it, even though it’s got a clean, modern interface, is the fact that Slim Dood and Violet Mars are working together quite a lot. They’re listening to feedback and pumping out releases quite quickly. That should hopefully end up with a really good, really sleek, really powerful FPS tool which is free as well. Even though it’s fairly usable right now, once all the bugs are ironed out (and I’ll talk about the bugs later on in this video), I think we’ll end up with a really cool, sleek bit of software.

So, this is Clean Meter, and this is the actual interface once you’ve installed and set it up, which I’ll show off in this video. Under “Settings,” you can start with Windows or start minimized, and then you’ve got the overlay settings. You can choose what display you actually want it to go on – in my case, I want it on my main monitor. You can choose exactly where you want it to appear. You can choose exactly if it’s at the top or the bottom; it’ll be left, right, or center. So you’ve got those six positions showing where you actually want it to be, but it starts a little bit down. Basically, even if you have it in the top right, you’re still going to be able to access and close windows and things like that, so that’s quite good.

You can customize the graph type as well. You can say you want your temperature and your usage stats to show up, you know, more circular, or you can have them as bars, or you can just turn them off completely. Then obviously, things become a lot less wide – you’re going to have less width tothe FPSmonitoring thing, and actually, it shows as a percentage instead. Some people might like that. I’ll leave mine on circular for now. We’ve got those different options.

You can then, for the orientation, mix things up. You can have it as a strip, or you can have it vertical as two. Then you can actually customize things exactly as you would like. So you can use this tool – you don’t just have to use it for gaming. If you’re using it just as a general system monitor, you could literally just turn off the FPS counts, and then you’ve got a nice, sleek system monitor. It looks really good, and it doesn’t actually distract you much. Even though it takes some getting used to new software, I find this doesn’t distract me very much when it’s open.

Again, you can have your GPU settings as well, including your VRAM usage. You’ve got your CPU temperature and usage, and also the RAM as well.

Gameplay Demo

If we do some gameplay demos, I’m justin Rocket League. Completely knackering this – the shot was absolutely terrible. You can see the FPS monitor there down there on the left, and you can barely see it. It’s just really sleek, gives you all the information you need, but it doesn’t get in the way either. And as I said earlier, you can move its position, which I’ll show you a bit more later on. Let’s try again. That is not a very good frame for the shot, but yes, I just scored there. And again, the FPS monitor looks really good down there.

Now, if we do Serious Sam, just in Mayhem mode for now, I’ll do a slightly longer demo. So at the moment now, I’ve got my monitor stats over there on the right, and it looks really good. I’ve got my full data as well. I’ve got my RAM and my VRAM usage as well because originally, I didn’t tick the right box, so I’ll show you how to do that later if you’re not getting that through. So you can see the full thing there. I’ve got it as bars as opposed to circular for the actual visualization. I’ve got my frame rate time and obviously my FPS too. Obviously, I don’t have V-sync enabled for this old game, so my FPS is just really high. But it’s just a really good, sleek monitor, and as I said, you can move its position as well, and you can disable or enable various stats as well.

Oh, I suck at this game. Where’s my shotgun? Where’s my shotgun? No, that’s not it. Yes, brilliant! I absolutely suck at this game. This is not advice on actually how you play this game because I’m really terrible at it. But yeah, you can see the FPS monitor just looks really nice, really sleek, and I really like it. It does exactly what it needs to do – no more, no less – and I’m really excited to see what happens in the future with this.

How To Configure It

As you can see from this gameplay footage, this is quite a powerful bit of software. It shows you a lot of information but in a really sleek, clean, minimalist way, which is one of the reasons I really like this. It doesn’t get in the way as much as some of the other FPS tracking tools. I’ve actually paid for FPS Monitor, which is probably the most powerful bit of software out there, and that is incredibly customizable, but it does get in the way a lot. And even though you can tweak things, you’ll probably be spending half an hour to an hour actually configuring things. Most of the time, especially if just doing casual gaming, something like this will work a lot better. So I think going forward, I’ll probably be using this instead of FPS Monitor or Steam’s built-in one or something like that.

But there are some issues. So now, let’s come to actually how to set this up. Right now, this is actually dependent on MSI Afterburner, which doesn’t mean you need an NVIDIA card or an MSI graphics card. I’ve actuallygot an AMD graphics card, the Sapphire RX 6700, and this software still works fine with that. You will need to actually go out and download MSI Afterburner, and then you actually configure things accordingly.

So basically, when you’re actually done installing it, you’ve got MSI Afterburner open, you’ve got to go through these instructions: You go to the settings by pressing the cog, you go to “Monitor,” and the first thing you’ve actually got to do is bring across two stats from HWiNFO. So that’s another dependency, and yes, most of us do have HWiNFO installed as well, but if you don’t, you’re going to need to download that as well. So you’ll need MSI Afterburner and HWiNFO in order to run Clean Meter.

They are looking to reduce the dependency on MSI Afterburner and hopefully get rid of it completely and pull all the stats from HWiNFO, but it’s just worth knowing that this Clean Meter is more of a wrapper. It’s not going to get the stats by itself; it’s just a nice UI over the top of MSI Afterburner and HWiNFO ultimately.

So we click these dots to get the data we need, and we will go to HWiNFO and click on “Setup.” I’ve already set this up, but basically what you need to do is click on “Add,” and you need to look for the physical memory load. Way at the bottom, you need to also look for the GPU memory load. You need to actually add those in so you’ve got them there, and then you click on “OK” when you’re done. You need to actually bring those in; otherwise, it won’t work. So that’s in the readme, and that’s how you do it.

However, there is something more you need to do. At first, I wasn’t seeing the physical memory load or the GPU memory usage. In that case, what you’ve got to do is in HWiNFO, you’ve got to actually open it up, go to the settings before it’s running, then you’ve got to make sure the shared memory support is enabled. If you haven’t enabled that (and it does say this in MSI Afterburner as well), if you haven’t enabled this particular setting, then you’re not going to be able to add the physical memory load or the GPU memory usage, and then the Clean Meter app won’t work as expected.

So basically, in HWiNFO, make sure that’s enabled, click “OK,” then you can start running that. Ultimately, then you can go into MSI Afterburner and add the data that you need. Once that’s done (and I forgot to do it at first, which is why my Rocket League stats didn’t actually show the RAM usage), when you’re on the monitoring page, you’ve got to go along and tick absolutely everything. If memory usage is unticked, you’ve got to select that, and then you come to the bottom, make sure that RAM usage is ticked and all the frame rate options and all that. If you don’t click them, then as I mentioned, you’re just not going to get some of this extra data. Either the FPS rate won’t pull through, or the GPU VRAM usage and your system RAM usage won’t actually pull through.

So you need to make sure they’re all enabled, apply, and then restart MSI Afterburner and restart Clean Meter if it’s already running. You do that, and then hopefully all the stats will start pulling through. Then in the overlay settings, you can just scroll down. It’s not clear at first, but you can scroll down with your mouse, and then you tick all the different options you actually want to keep showing.

So that’s how you set it up. Right now, as I said, there is unfortunately that dependency on having MSI Afterburner running and HWiNFO, and having that shared memory support enabled. Then in Clean Meter, you should get the data you need. So that is important to know.

In terms of actually installing Clean Meter, I’ll put the link down in GitHub, but basically you go to GitHub, which is perfectly safe, and you know, I’ve virus-checked all this as well. You go on GitHub, you go on the “Releases” button over on the right, and then you can choose what version you want. So you might go for this one, which is more the stable one, or I actually went for the pre-release. I just downloaded it there, and then it just runs as a portable app. So you can go directly into the folder, double-click it, and then Clean Meter will appear and start running. You’ll get everything you need there.

Bugs At The Time Of Filming

There are some bugs, though, that are worth pointing out. So firstly, as the readme shows, if you look at the GitHub right now, it doesn’t work in exclusive full-screen mode – in other words, what most games actually launch at. It just won’t show anything, and they are looking at fixing that bug. But right now, it won’t do that. So if you wanted to run with the very first versions just to check this out and see what everyone’s talking about, then you will need to go into bordered or windowed mode to actually get this working. So that is one thing worth knowing.

There are a couple of other bugs. Some people in the Reddit comments mentioned about right-to-left support not being completely there. So right now, I think the software is actually hardcoded things to left-to-right until such time as they can actually add proper right-to-left support. It doesn’t also have a game toggle, so right now this will always show up even if your game isn’t actually running. Some people don’t like the actual system monitor being there all the time, even when they’re not gaming. I don’t mind it because I actually quite like seeing all my stats at a glance, and it doesn’t get in the way. But if you don’t like it, you’ll actually have to have Clean Monitor disabled and not running until you go to a game and then enable it just before. So it is with caveats, but at some point, they’ll probably have a game toggle button or something like that.

And that wraps up this video about Clean Meter. I think it’s actually pretty cool, and what Violet Mars and Slim Dood – what they’ve both done in just a few days is amazing. It’s absolutely amazing that, you know, Violet Mars had this design and then Slim Dood or Danilo actually created this thing in a few days. I’m actually a software developer by trade, and it is really impressive to actually take a design to something that works – an MVP – in a few days. So kudos to you both, and I take my hat off to you.

I actually talk through loads ofdifferent FPS monitoring stats in another video. If you wanted to check that out, it’ll appear here somewhere. But actually, Clean Meter is a really, really good option, especially since it’s free. But obviously, right now we just have that MSI Afterburner dependency. I’ll probably look back to this tool in a few months or in six months or something just to see how the progress has developed on it. But I’m really excited about this tool.

Tristan has been interested in computer hardware and software since he was 10 years old. He has built loads of computers over the years, along with installing, modifying and writing software (he’s a backend software developer ‘by trade’).Tristan also has an academic background in technology (in Math and Computer Science), so he enjoys drilling into the deeper aspects of technology.Tristan is also an avid PC gamer, with FFX and Rocket League being his favorite games.