MDK for Mac OS FPS Counter

As well as the really nice graphics speed benchmark in the menu, the Mac OS version of MDK also has a built in frame counter! This can be handy for comparing the performance of different video cards on computers in this type of workload (pushing pixels to the screen – raw graphics performance not using QuickDraw) on PowerPC Macs. This game is surprisingly well optimised for a port to the platform. Genuinely, hats off to the programmers.

To enable the FPS display, type “frate”. If your computer is a bit slow, don’t type it too quickly, type it with purpose.

I swear I read about this feature on a website once, but I just spent half an hour trying to find this tip, even searching ‘MDK “frate”‘ and I didn’t get useful results. Hopefully this post will help someone else out.

The counter appears to give the FPS as “<current> (<average>)” in the bottom right, under the health HUD.

If you haven’t also seen the graphics benchmark, it runs routines manipulating on screen pixels and compares your computer to the performance of a 100MHz 601, a 145MHz 604e, and a 275MHz 603e. Basically you might say, an 8100/100, a 9500/150 and a 6400/275. Yes, I can’t find any 145MHz 604e based Macs, I’m not sure they existed, even that 9500 is possibly a 604, not a 604e. The benchmark is available at Main Menu > Options > Performance.

Yes, I have been testing an underwhelming computer 😉