Calculating frames per second in a game

Question

What\'s a good algorithm for calculating frames per second in a game? I want to show it as a number in the corner of the screen. If I just look at how long it took to render

Answer 1

Here's a complete example, using Python (but easily adapted to any language). It uses the smoothing equation in Martin's answer, so almost no memory overhead, and I chose values that worked for me (feel free to play around with the constants to adapt to your use case).

import time

SMOOTHING_FACTOR = 0.99
MAX_FPS = 10000
avg_fps = -1
last_tick = time.time()

while True:
    # 

    current_tick = time.time()
    # Ensure we don't get crazy large frame rates, by capping to MAX_FPS
    current_fps = 1.0 / max(current_tick - last_tick, 1.0/MAX_FPS)
    last_tick = current_tick
    if avg_fps < 0:
        avg_fps = current_fps
    else:
        avg_fps = (avg_fps * SMOOTHING_FACTOR) + (current_fps * (1-SMOOTHING_FACTOR))
    print(avg_fps)