In-game frame rates - how to display?

I've wandered through just about the entire archive, and haven't seen this posted anywhere.

Several people have stated that this graphics adapter has a better framerate "in games" than some other adapter, even though they're within way less than 1% of each other in benchmarks (3DMark2001 or 03).  I'd like to think that this is based on some sort of actual experience, and not just guesswork (yeah, I'm charmingly naive), so that implies there's some way to display the active framerate while in a game.  Granted, I'm not by any means a gaming aficionado, but I haven't seen any way to get the framerate to display.  I've RTSM (hmm, the profanity checker won't let me put an "f" instead of the "s")  for SWKotOR, which is what I'm playing now - no joy.

How do you *know* what the framerate is in a game?  If your character is standing in a hallway with nothing else going on, the framerate is going to be lower than when body parts are flying.  What section of the game do you use to determine "faster"?

I know that on Tom's Hardware, etc., they use a standard set of things to test the machines - I have the impression they're not stand-alone tests, but are acutally parts of the complete game.  The Boss (my wife, for those who aren't married yet) won't let me burn a bunch of money just to buy games to test framerates - go figure.  For benchmarking, I have 3DMark2001 SE, 3DMark03, Sandra, and AquaMark3.  Hey, I'm a statistical network design engineer - numbers are my life.

I ask all this because I'm going to be installing an Nvidia GeForce FX 5650 Go in my i8500 (the name of that card needs several more words to be "long enough") and I'm really curious to see how it stacks up, especially compared to the m9600.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Glen
i8500
2.2GHz P4m
512Mb RAM
Radeon m9000

Eschew misoneism.