Fraps has took a nose dive; hard disk to blame?

[Coomber]

Right not too sure what forum this should go in because it could be due to a number of things.

First a little backstory. Once upon a time I, using rig in sig, started playing about with Fraps recording MW2. I would first make some videos using half size 60fps, recording was smooth, and almost always at 60fps. Some time passes and I try recording again, this time at full size so I can make 720p videos. The game then jitters from 40-60fps constantly and ruins everything.

I then tried taking it back down to half-size. However the jittering persisted. I am starting to wonder if my hard disk cannot keep up with playing the game and recording huge uncompressed AVI files both at once as it used to. I've had the disk for about a year now, I defrag it pretty often, is there anything I can do to it that could increase its performance? Or is it time to buy a new one?

BTW I was also able to play these videos back smoothly in WMP, VLC, VirtualDub etc. Now they jitter even more than when I'm recording them.

 

[Gundog48]

I'm not sure what to blame. But I do gameplay vids for MW2. Recording on fraps makes the game unplayable for me, but using the xFire recorder is excellent. Same settings and use 25FPS (it does not cap your FPS ingame). I have a pretty poor computer compared to you so it should be fine.

Admittedly, I do not record in HD as my monitor is 1440x900, but recording in half size of that then stretching it out again to HD makes the quality better than all these console gamers and their HDPVRs.

Hope it helps!

 

[Coomber]

I could stretch a half-size video to double the size and then export to 720p but this would lose too much quality IMO.

How has Xfire's recorder come along? Are there other alternatives that work as well as Fraps? I've also tried the cap-FPS on Fraps but for some reason if the game ever dips below the cap FPS (due to a lot going on at once, smoke, etc) it gets stuck at that FPS until I stop recording.

I think I might buy a WD Raptor. I think SSDs are still too expensive. I would then use the WD Black as recording device as it would be dedicated (am I overthinking this).