Since the global positioning system began to operate, it has become more and more close to people’s lives, and has been applied to various fields now. In order to track and decode GPS signals, GPS signals need to be captured first. The necessary parameters of the captured GPS signal are immediately transmitted to the tracking process, and then the navigation message of the satellite can be obtained by tracking process. In this paper, the basic contents related to the signal structure of GPS system are briefly described. Then, the traditional GPS signal acquisition method based on time domain correlation method is introduced, and the GPS signal acquisition method based on FFT cyclic correlation method is discussed in this paper. By comparing the simulation results, two kinds of GPS signal acquisition methods are compared with the calculation time according to the method of controlling variables. For the two GPS signal acquisition methods, the variation of time delay error with SNR is simulated in this paper.