FPS Test: Find Your Device's Frame Rate Limit

Your frame rate collapsed instead of declining

A cliff means your frame rate held steady and then broke. It did not drift down gradually — it fell off. That shape is the signature of a hard limit being reached: something ran out, rather than something getting busy.

Typically this is a per-frame cost that crossed a threshold at once, so frame time jumps instead of creeping. In a browser it can also be the point where the compositor stops accelerating a layer and starts doing that work on the CPU.

What to try first:

1. Turn hardware acceleration back on, if it is off. With it off, every frame is rendered on the CPU, and the cliff arrives much earlier than the hardware would require.
2. Close other GPU-heavy tabs — a video, another animation, a 3D page. They compete for the same compositor.
3. Re-run the scan and see whether the cliff moved. If it did not move at all, the limit is more likely the device itself than anything running on it.

What this does not mean: it does not mean your machine cannot run games at that frame rate. A browser page and a game engine load the GPU through different paths, and the two numbers are not interchangeable.

Your frame rate declined gradually

A gradient means frame time grew steadily as load went up. Nothing broke — your device simply had less and less headroom, and this curve shows where that headroom ran out.

This is the most common shape on laptops and on phones, and it is the one where the number itself matters least. What matters is where the curve starts bending, because that is the load your device can actually sustain rather than survive.

What to try first:

1. Run it again with the charger plugged in and power mode set to performance. Many laptops cut the GPU's power budget on battery before they cut anything else.
2. Close background apps that keep the GPU awake — chat clients, overlays, recording tools.
3. Compare this scan's curve with your previous one above. If the bend moved to the right, whatever you changed helped; that comparison is more reliable than any single run.

What this does not mean: a gradient does not identify which component is the limit. It tells you the shape of the limit, not its cause.

Your frame rate was uneven before it dropped

A sawtooth means your frame rate bounced between levels instead of holding one. The average can look fine while the spacing between individual frames is not — and uneven spacing is what stutter actually is. This is the shape where an average FPS number is most misleading.

What to try first:

1. Check what else is using the GPU. A sawtooth that starts at the lowest load usually points to something competing, not to the device running out of power.
2. Try a different browser once. If the sawtooth disappears, the cause was in the browser rather than in the hardware.
3. If the pattern is still there on a second run in the same session, run it a third time after a restart. Unevenness that survives a restart is worth knowing about.

What this does not mean: it does not mean your device is slow. A sawtooth says frames are unevenly spaced, not that they are few.

Your hardware is ahead of your display

No ceiling was found because there was nothing for this scan to break. Your device rendered the heaviest load the scan can generate without dropping a frame. On this screen, that means the display is what limits what you see — not the hardware behind it.

In practice: on a 60 Hz panel you will not see a difference between a machine that manages 90 FPS and one that manages 300. Both are capped at 60. If you want to find where your hardware actually gives out, you need a display that can show it.

What this does not mean: it does not mean the scan failed, and it does not mean this test only works on slow devices. "No ceiling in range" is a valid result — the range was simply not high enough to reach your limit.