Fraps: Ways to improve FPS or a better recording tool?

thezeronumber

thezeronumber

thezeronumber

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As it says in the title really: Any suggestions on how to improve the FPS you get when running Fraps or other recommendations when it comes to recording software? On my old Graphics Card i tried a ton of tools and most of them acted just like all the others; terribly. Since purchasing a new GTX 480 (special edition Gigabyte) i've noticed a huge increase in gaming FPS and so i decided to try out a few of them again.

* While Fraps does handle decently now, it's still not perfect. I can deal with the 35-50 fps but Fraps can drop to 5-10 for a few seconds every few minutes, so it's a huge annoyance when you want to record a solid 10-15 minutes of footage. I know Fraps chops videos into 3 minute sections to make it easier on the system but the FPS drops aren't predictable and don't coincide with the video cuts. Not sure why this happens but it's highly frustrating.
* I've tried Xfire and it's actually pretty good, but the audio lags behind the visual when playing back and it gets progressively worse as you continue watching.
* WeGame doesn't support the game i am trying to record (Monday Night Combat) so i've yet to give that a go.
* I found out that MSI Afterburner has its own video tool, but that doesn't record sound so it's unfortunately not suitable either.

I heard that recording to a second Hard-drive can help the FPS in Fraps, but since installing a second one and directing the footage on there i cannot say i notice a huge difference (if any). Generally speaking, would over-clocking the CPU greatly increase what sort of FPS i can achieve when recording? Same for the GPU? Anything else along those lines which i can do to help myself gain a few more frames and possibly stop this weird FPS dive-bomb i get every few minutes when using Fraps?
 
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The problem you are having, is fraps is trying to max out your CPU by encoding on the fly while it's being used by a game, so the game takes a hit
Recording to a different HDD will help and recording in half quality will help a ton too but will take a huge loss on quality.
I have a quad core, and if I'm recording, in task manager (set affinity) I set fraps to use core4, and games to use 1,2 and 3. Give that shot and see if it helps.
Overclocking won't do any thing, as both programs will try to take advantage of it and just cancel it out.
 
Playclaw and 2 HDDs are the best option. I run the games off of one hard drive, and have the footage saving to the other. I managed to record at 60fps without compression using a 5770 :)
 
who wants to watch videos of people playing games? :/

if you're serious, i suppose the best way is to capture the video out from another machine.
 
There are some valid reasons too like showing the graphical qualities in games, showing walkthroughs and so on.

I record in full res (1920x1200) fps lock off and get 40-50fps in most non fps games where I don't mind having <60fps during a recording otherwise it's half res 60 with fps lock off. Then just re-encode that to h.264 and upload to youtube or wherever.
 
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That was uncalled for, marc. For someone which has been on this forum for 7 years and posted over 14,000 times, i expected a little more help and a lot less of the back-handed slander towards subjects which you don't understand yourself. Just because you may dislike or not approve of something, that doesn't mean it's a waste of time or that the person taking part "has no life".

Moving on, thanks for all the suggestions and replies, i will try them out soon. I tried PlayClaw on my old GPU so will be interesting to see if it makes a difference on my new one. :)
 
Marc wasn't being rude, it was a jokey comment that you took the wrong way. If you though that was bad I'll keep my mouth shut on what I think of it :D

And can't get you get video capture hardware that sits between gfx card and monitor?

It takes all the strain off the system.
 
thezeronumber said:
I found out that MSI Afterburner has its own video tool, but that doesn't record sound so it's unfortunately not suitable either.QUOTE]

It records sound just fine - I recorded myself playing PvZ yesterday to test it out, and it definitely records sound.

Also tested it with BFBC2, and recording full screen with decent compression it's far better than FRAPS.
Click to expand...
 
Use the MSI tool and use something else to record stereo mix? EG - GoldWave.

Overlay the files later.

Also, if you record at 30FPS you lock the game out at 30 FPS. You don't NEED 60FPS for a video, 25-30 is plenty unless you want to do slow motion work. Any increase in FPS while recording is purely for playability.

I could quite comfortably Fraps WoW at 60FPS in 1920x1200 while running the game maxxed out. Stream directed to a different HDD on a Q6600 clocked to 3.6GHz. Are you using a new enough version with multi-core support?

Your problem is likely to do with HDD usage, particularly when hitting the 4GB file size limit and spilling over into a new file. If you can record perfectly outside of the stuter points then you have the hardware to cope with the compression.

NEVER use half-size recording in Fraps, you are trading CPU cycles for lower filesize. Record at the res you play at, 30FPS, to a second HDD.
 
WoW is hardly on the same level as Left4Dead or Battlefield. I (and many others) would sooner scoup one eyeball out then point it in front of the other just to see what happens than play an online FPS at 30fps.

Thankfully Fraps has a framerate unlock feature so while you can record the video at 30fps you can play at 60 or whatever.

Half res recording has no problems either. you're still getting close to 720p quality out of a half res if you game at 1920x1200 and on youtube these look great.

Using other apps for audio etc is just a faff. It's far easier just to press the video record shortcut ingame and turn it off when the recording is done.

but yes, recording to another HDD is better and helps a lot compared to most other solutions.
 
Half res recording requires additional cycles to process ALONG with the compression. Why would you want to unless you have no HDD space? Half res recording produces trashy output and always has done unless it had SERIOUS work in later versions.

Much much better to do a resize with a quality algorithm when rendering the footage later when you can spend as much time as you want processing it.

Why is it difficult to splice in audio later and sync it? It's not, who the hell wants to upload un-editted footage anyway? You will more than likely be editting it/rendering after anyway.
 
We're talking about different scenarios here, I'm on about quick recordings of online games, they just need to be recorded, or parts of the game anyway and then uploaded after being converted to a high quality compressed format for youtube. You're on about authoring a full on gaming video.

Fraps fully compress encoded video anyway though, it uses some compression but not enough to notice a difference between a Fraps AVI and a raw AVI.

I found half res gives better performance when recording parts of games, especially those with heavy system requirements (Crysis).
 
I'm fine with comical sarcasm but the "no life" comment was a bit too much in my eyes. It's likely he wasn't intending to be rude but i still felt it was uncalled for considering the topic of discussion. No worries though. :)

uv said:
It records sound just fine - I recorded myself playing PvZ yesterday to test it out, and it definitely records sound.
Click to expand...
A Beta version perhaps? I'm asking this because i downloaded the latest stable release last week and there are no options for sound recording in the settings or under the video tab. In the version history it even states "Audio stream capture and additional video capture related enhancements are coming in future versions". A bit confused now!

As for the other replies, it is true that i don't need to record at 60 fps although i do find there is a significant difference between footage taken at 30 and 60. Even after processing and an upload to YouTube, myself and others can still see a quality difference between the two. Not sure how it comes to be like that as i thought YouTube plays back videos at 30fps, regardless of what the file was saved as, but the difference is definitely present. I might have to give recording at 40 or 45 fps a go, seems like a good middle ground to start on.

I tend to record a ton of videos in 5-20 minute sections, so recording sound outside of the video capture would be a fiddly process when it comes to grouping audio A to visual A amongst hundreds of files (what i believe Khaaan was making a point about), but it's a valid idea and i will happily try it out, thanks!

I gave PlayClaw a go earlier and it works pretty well. Maintain high FPS when recording (claims it was 80-120 but felt more like 50-60, which is still great) and playback is pretty decent, although i do have a problem with the end footage. Seems that every 5 seconds the video would skip ahead a couple of frames, freeze for a split second to let itself catch up, and then continue playing. A bit hard to explain so for example, instead of the frames counting 1 to 10, it would instead go 1-5, skip to 8, wait for 6 and 7 to be counted, and then it would playback as normal. After watching the recorded footage for a minute it gets very noticeable and you can predict it right down to the very second. I checked out the forums and other users have reported similar problems but with no sign of a solution, so i don't dare purchase the full version if it's going to do that all the time.
 
Fraps 3.4.0 is now out btw, improves full res performance and other things.
 
Problem with that is i cannot recall the password i signed up with and the e-mail it was once registered to has since been deactivated due to a load of spam getting by the filters, thus i cannot even recover it. Guess i'm stuck with my current version (3.2.2 if i remember correctly).

I tried recording at 30 fps with Fraps again and i have to admit that the results aren't as bad as i remembered before. I think the last time i was recording at 30 fps it was on a single HDD, so it seems the second HDD has made a difference in that area. However Fraps doesn't have a true unlocked frames feature... I tested with "Lock Framerate" off as well as on and both times i was recording and playing the game at 30 fps, no difference between the two. I did a little research and it seems that it will always try to play back at 60+ fps with it off, but if it falls below that figure for more than 2 seconds it will revert to the next division of the setting you are recording at. For example, if i was trying to record at 20 it would try to keep the game fps at 60, but if that fails it would jump down to 40 (a multiplication of 20), and if that fails too it would drop down to 20 altogether. Seeing as my game seems to level around the 35-50 fps mark, it gives up on 60 fps and dips right down to 30 whether i like it or not.

This is why i liked PlayClaw and Xfire; you can record at a different framerate but playback will always be much higher than that with very minor limitations. It's just a shame those two programmes don't work that brilliantly.
 
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