Your CPU is the bottleneck tonight. Here's why.
Dr. Frame reads the same telemetry as every other monitoring tool — then does the part they skip. It tells you, in one plain sentence, what's actually costing you frames, and what to change about it.
Frame time spiked repeatedly through the session. Cause: single-channel RAM — one stick installed where the board supports dual-channel.
Fix: add a matched second stick, or move the sticks into the paired slots your motherboard manual specifies. Every real verdict comes with the raw values it was read from, so you can check the working yourself.
The actual difference
Same data. One of these tells you what to do with it.
Afterburner, HWiNFO, RTSS — they're all excellent at instrumentation. None of them will tell you what a number means. That's the gap Dr. Frame sits in.
Your 1% lows are the problem, not your averages — and it's not the GPU. One CPU core is pegged while the rest sit idle: single-channel RAM is starving the memory controller.
Worked exampleBoth columns describe the same imagined session — one read leaves you guessing, the other leaves you with a fix. These are illustrative figures, not a recording of anyone's machine.
What you actually get
Three ways to use it, one job underneath
Whether you want a five-minute check before ranked or you want it running quietly all session, the diagnosis layer is the same — only the trigger changes.
Check Now
A one-shot scan of your rig's config and current state — misconfigurations, driver hygiene, thermal headroom. Takes under a minute, no game required. Free, always.
Live Monitor
Continuous background sampling at 1Hz — light enough that it never becomes the performance problem it's watching for. Alerts you mid-session when something changes, not just at the end.
Benchmark mode
A 60-second CPU/GPU stress pass you can run before and after changing a setting. Turns "I think that helped" into a before/after number you can actually trust.
The misconfig scan checks for things you'd never think to check
Windows and BIOS defaults are conservative by design. A lot of the "upgrade" you paid for is sitting there switched off.
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XMP / EXPO not enabledYour RAM is running at stock JEDEC speed instead of the rated kit speed you paid for.
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Power plan not set to High PerformanceWindows silently defaults to Balanced, which throttles clocks during exactly the moments you need them.
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Refresh rate stuck at 60HzCommon after a driver update or a monitor swap — you're paying for a 144Hz panel and rendering 60.
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GPU stuck on iGPU or an eco power modeLaptops especially — plugged in, but still rendering on integrated graphics or a vendor "eco" clock cap.
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G-Sync / FreeSync half-enabledHas to be turned on in both the monitor's OSD and the GPU driver — most people only do one.
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Page file parked on an HDDWhile your OS and games sit on NVMe — the swap file becomes the slowest thing in the chain.
Pricing
Start free. Pay when the history matters more than the check.
The diagnosis sentence — "here's what's actually wrong" — is free forever, on every tier. You pay for how much of your own history we keep, and how deep we go into it.
There is no in-game overlay on any tier, and no free trial period — Free is genuinely free and stays useful on its own, so there's nothing to expire. Cancel a paid plan in one click from Settings.
Why £6/mo, not a one-time price
You didn't spend £2,000 on this rig to check it once.
A one-time scan tells you what's wrong today. It can't tell you your temps are trending up over three months of dust buildup, or that last night's driver update quietly capped your clocks. That only shows up with history — and history is the part that costs us something to keep.
So the price tracks what you're actually paying for: not a report, but somewhere that keeps watching after the report's done.
No press logos, no fake reviews
Dr. Frame is a pre-launch, solo-developer project. There's no customer count to show you and no star rating to quote, because there aren't customers yet — there's a working diagnostic and a person building it.
It exists because staring at an FPS counter and guessing why it dipped got old. Every misconfig check in this product started as something that actually cost real frames on a real rig, cross-checked against vendor documentation and enthusiast testing rather than lifted from a generic "33 tweaks" listicle.
If that's the kind of tool you want to try before anyone else has weighed in on it, the free tier costs nothing to find out.
Privacy, terms & the disclaimer that matters
The short, readable version
Dr. Frame is a pre-launch build. This section is the current statement of what it collects, what rights you have over it, and what it explicitly will not be held responsible for. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
Hardware advice disclaimer
Dr. Frame gives you diagnosis and instructions — never one-click remediation. Anything below the operating system (BIOS/UEFI settings, memory profiles, power limits, firmware) has to be changed by you, deliberately, on your own machine.
All guidance is informational and offered without warranty. Verify any recommendation against your motherboard, CPU and GPU vendor documentation before changing a setting. Overclocking, undervolting, altering memory profiles or raising power limits can destabilise or, over time, degrade hardware. You accept that risk; Dr. Frame accepts no liability for hardware damage, data loss or voided warranties arising from changes you make.
What is collected
- Configuration readings — OS build, CPU and GPU model, display adapters, RAM layout, driver versions, and the specific Windows/registry values each check reads. These are stored so a scan result can show you its own evidence.
- Live samples, only while Live Monitor is running — CPU load, RAM used/total, GPU load, VRAM used/total, roughly once a second.
- Account data — the username you sign in with and which devices belong to it.
Not collected: your screen, your keystrokes or mouse input, game process memory, browsing history, file contents, or anything that would require injecting code into a running game. Frame rate and frame times are not captured at all, because doing so needs exactly that kind of hook.
Your rights over it (UK GDPR)
- Export — one button in Settings returns everything held about your account as JSON.
- Deletion — one button in Settings permanently deletes your account and every device, scan and billing record attached to it.
- Retention — telemetry is deleted once it falls outside your tier's history window (Free 48 hours, Pro 30 days, Creator and Fleet 90 days). Data outside the window is removed, not merely hidden behind the paywall.
- Consent — monitoring does not start until you have read the disclosure screen and accepted it. If that acknowledgement can't be recorded, nothing starts.
Your data is never sold or shared with third-party advertisers. There is no third-party analytics or tracking script on this page.
Subscription terms
- Paid plans are billed in advance and can be cancelled in one click from Settings, at any time, with no phone call, retention flow or email required.
- Cancelling stops the next renewal; access continues to the end of the period already paid for.
- Prices are in GBP and shown inclusive of any applicable UK VAT. Pricing and features may change before launch.
- In this pre-launch build, billing is a clearly labelled test stub. No payment method is collected and no card is ever charged.
Scope
Windows 10 and 11 only. macOS, Linux and Steam Deck are explicitly out of scope and not on the near-term roadmap. Dr. Frame is operated from the UK by a sole developer; for any privacy request, use the export and deletion controls in Settings, which act immediately.
Run the free check. Takes under a minute.
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