Smooth FRAPS Recording?


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What are your PC's specs if you can't even record at 1280x720 smoothly?

Already posted and I never said I couldn't record at that resolution smoothly, I just said it wasn't an option as I'd like to record long session games

and I won't be playing 2-3 hours at 1280x720 on a 1920x1200 native monitor.

Here's what I do.. there shouldn't be any problems (make sure your FRAPS is up to date too)

I record to a separate drive than the one the game is running from. Usually games read data and that might be slowing you down. This drive is SATA internal.

I don't record to 1920x1200 because it's really unnecessary but I tried it at 1920 as well and it worked fine. Hell I even recorded at 2560x1600 as I have a 30" screen.

Make sure your sound capturing is STEREO and not multichannel (this strains everything a lot more if you capture in multichannel)

I had EXACT same symptoms as you describe. Make sure you keep it at 60fps recording always. Don't debug at 30 because that's what's causing the problem I guarantee you that.

Yeah, I am using my secondary Samsung F1 as the output drive, it's set to Stereo and 60FPS.

My settings are identical to yours, D:\FRAPS is even my output folder :laugh:

I load up ArmA II Map Editor on Utes, it's going between 100 and 120FPS, I hit my record button and bam, it's basically locked at 21 MAX

and it even goes down to 18-15 as I move around.

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Already posted and I never said I couldn't record at that resolution smoothly, I just said it wasn't an option as I'd like to record long session games

and I won't be playing 2-3 hours at 1280x720 on a 1920x1200 native monitor.

Yeah, I am using my secondary Samsung F1 as the output drive, it's set to Stereo and 60FPS.

My settings are identical to yours, D:\FRAPS is even my output folder :laugh:

I load up ArmA II Map Editor on Utes, it's going between 100 and 120FPS, I hit my record button and bam, it's basically locked at 21 MAX

and it even goes down to 18-15 as I move around.

What's your FRAPS version? 3.1.1?

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Maybe it's the game. I used to record videos of Counter-Strike 1.6 with FRAPS and I didn't notice that big of a hit. With performance-demanding games like Supreme Commander, my FPS would literally drop to 2 as soon as I started recording.

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I think you're wasting your time.

1. Fraps love CPU cycles. Unfortunately your game is probably eating at least 50% of them. Better luck with an older game - some people report very good results with oldies like Warcraft III etc.

2. 1920x1200x60fps is A LOT of data per second (raw data = 1920x1200x60xRGB = 414MB/s :blink: ). Even with the real-time compression fraps does (and compressing that stream is an INCREDIBLE strain on the CPU), unless you have a crazy RAID0 hard drive setup it's unlikely you can achieve that.

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That begs the question, what did you record Boz? I noticed you were doing posting some Bad Company 2 videos, did you have smooth recordings there?

Of course.. smooth as hell and I was recording half of 2560x1600 (so: 1280x800) and had no hiccups or anything. I just lowered the size when I was encoding for web.

I had issues with MW2 when I was recording previously but i had it at 30fps and it was unplayable. As soon as I switched it to 60fps everything went up and I got smooth playback while recording.

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Okay, loaded up ArmA II once more, Utes, running around 100FPS and set FRAPS to 60FPS + Half-size - Which is a resolution of 960 x 540 and I was peaking at around 34 and averaging 28 or something and that's not exactly smooth in my book.

This is annoying :/

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I think you're wasting your time.

1. Fraps love CPU cycles. Unfortunately your game is probably eating at least 50% of them. Better luck with an older game - some people report very good results with oldies like Warcraft III etc.

2. 1920x1200x60fps is A LOT of data per second (raw data = 1920x1200x60xRGB = 414MB/s :blink: ). Even with the real-time compression fraps does (and compressing that stream is an INCREDIBLE strain on the CPU), unless you have a crazy RAID0 hard drive setup it's unlikely you can achieve that.

This is the sort of bottleneck I was thinking of. My PC has two performance drives in a RAID0 on a dedicated RAID controller. That's really the only difference between mine and Sethos' specs.

CPU strain isn't so bad when I'm recording, although my i7 920 is overclocked to hell @4GHz.

BTW the resolution I'm recording at is 1680x1050.

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So I tried as above, Half-size at 50, 45 and 40 yet it's still peaking at 34 on all of them and it's averaging out at like 25-28 - I should at least be able to get some smooth recordings at these dreadfully low resolutions / capture speeds :/ ?

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So I just opened portal, and recorded at 60fps with video settings MAXED on everything.

post-114394-1267064316109_thumb.png

I noticed that even before recording my fps MAXES at 60fps because the source engine limits your max fps.

Lowest fps I got was 46fps for half a second, it stayed at 58/59 fps almost the entire time.

One thing I did notice, playing it back in vlc player was REALLY laggy, but windows media player it was playing back in the full 58fps.

WMP 12 has hardware exceleration, vlc player does not.

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So I just opened portal, and recorded at 60fps with video settings MAXED on everything.

post-114394-1267064316109_thumb.png

Just Used the same settings except at 1920x1200 with vsync off and was getting 280fps, that dropped to 50fps when recording even thought Fraps was set to 60fps.

I tracked hard drive and CPU usage while doing this, so my CPU was below 50% usage the whole time but Fraps was transferring over 75MB/s to the harddrive.

I would say its safe to assume that the hard drive is the limiting factor.

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