A decade back, gaming used to be all about playing games at whichever configs your hardware could support.

But the landscape has changed now.

Games have become visually appetizing and demand more computing resources than ever.

a man holding controller in his hands on Windows with laptop placed infront of him

That makes you wonder how to check the stats of the system resource in use while playing games.

But it doesn’t work straight out of the box.

We will elaborate on MSI Afterburner and how you could configure it to display system stats while gaming.

MSI Afterburner App Window

What Is MSI Afterburner?

MSI Afterburner is a GPU-overclocking utility developed and distributed by MSI.

On top of that, this utility works with graphics cards of all brands including MSI-made GPUs.

MSI Afterburner Installation 1

Or, you’ve got the option to take control of the reigns and tweak everything yourself.

All in all, there’s pretty much everything related to GPU performance with this tool.

Check out ourdetailed guide to Using MSI Afterburnerto learn more about overclocking your GPU.

MSI Afterburner Installation 2

Can You Use MSI Afterburner to Monitor Important Stats?

you’re able to use MSI Afterburner to display the hardware stats on the screen and monitor them.

Most users think of MSI Afterburner as an overclocking utility only.

MSI Afterburner Installation 3

MSI Afterburner relies on RivaTuner Statistics Server to display the stats of the hardware resources in use.

You cannot see any stats on the screen if you don’t implement the RivaTuner Statistics Server.

The primary purpose of the RivaTuner Statistics Server is to offer OSD capabilities to MSI Afterburner.

Selecting GPU MSI Afterburner App

If you install only RTSS, you will be only able to see the FPS counter and nothing more.

So, installing both MSI Afterburner and RTSS is crucial.

You have to choose the components whose stats you want to display while running a game.

Adding Graphs To OSD in MSI Afterburner App

you might even visit the prefs tab and change the hotkey to toggle the On-screen display.

But you might change the size of the system stats text that appears on the screen.

you might even reposition the on-screen display to any area of the screen you like.

MSI Afterburner displaying system stats on screen

Here’s how to adjust the On-screen display for better visibility.

Increasing OSD Size in RTSS

Changing OSD Position in RTSS