FRAPS 1080 Recording...

[Wandering_Youth]

Anyone here use FRAPS? I recently built a new computer thinking it would be able to handle 1080p game recording, but I'm been having less than stellar performance.

Spoiler for PC Specs:

Intel I5 3750k (OC 4.6)
Corsair Vengeance 16 GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 680
ASUS Xonar DX

1 Corsair Force GT 120g - Windows 7 x64
2 WD Velociraptor (RAID 0) - Programs and Games
4 Hitachi 1 TB (RAID 5) - Storage

FRAPS is installed on the SSD, games are installed on the RAID 0 and the output video file is sent to the RAID 5. Is there something that is affecting my ability to record at 1080p?

Spoiler for My FRAP Capture settings:

With these settings I am using, the video created is only around 20-30 FPS, but during combat in a game the frames go all over the place from 5-30FPS.

Is there any way to record at 900p or 800p with FRAPS without actually changing my screen resolution? Things look horrible when I set it to record at Half Size of my native resolution (1920x1080).

[sa547]

Not easy, since the cap program usually produces very large AVIs, which at bigger resolutions could really slow down the system while recording.

I have my capture set up this way:
* Framerate set at 24 fps
* Half-size, not full-size

However, I also like to try other similar freeware cap/recording programs, because of Frap's AVI-only implementation (and little has changed in the last few years).

[Wandering_Youth]

Yeah, but thanks to some other sites out there I managed to tweak my system to capture some decent video now.

Apparently, my capture FPS was just too high like you said so I lowered it to 30FPS. Defragging the destination hard drive seems to really help too and putting the output file to the RAID 0 seems to have better write performance over RAID 5. The other thing to do was disable two separate audio captures as I had FRAPS capturing sound from the game and from my headset microphone which affected captured frame rate greatly.

Spoiler for HD 1080P Video Test:

Here's what I got and I'm pretty happy with it, however there still seems to be some random stuttering of the video as seen in v3 test video. *sigh* Guess I need to play at a lower screen resolution while capturing to get better quality video.

[Stealthtank]

Slightly off-topic but you wrote you had a Intel Core i5 3750K? You mean the Core i5 3570K right? Sorry, just got a little confused when I first read it. And by the way you have a very capable gaming machine which I am envious of.

I haven't used FRAPS in many years and the maximum resolution I've ever recorded at was at 1280x1024 and that was in a primarily 2D game. However I know that real-time screen recording is incredibly taxing on systems. A 1920x1080 3D screencast would be simply hellish.

Anyways the FRAPS codec is not optimized for compression meaning a huge amount of data must be written to the hard drive especially when using a high resolution like yours. So I believe if you want to improve screencasting performance you'll need a storage medium with a greater throughput (Two Western Digital Velociraptors in RAID 0 may not be enough...!).

So yeah. May I suggest using a 240 GB (or larger) solid state drive utilizing a second generation Sandforce controller as a target drive?

[Wandering_Youth]

You are correct, I meant a 3570k. I actually noticed another problem when trying to view these ridiculously large uncompressed videos. My player can't seem to play the video smoothly so when I view it the frames were bouncing all over the place so I thought it was not capturing properly. In reality it was the player that wasn't playing the video properly, but once I compress it the played video was smooth as butter.

I switch the output file back to the RAID 5 array as I heard that it might actually be better than the RAID 0 since I got four hard drives for the RAID 5.

Originally Posted by Stealthtank

Slightly off-topic but you wrote you had a Intel Core i5 3750K? You mean the Core i5 3570K right? Sorry, just got a little confused when I first read it. And by the way you have a very capable gaming machine which I am envious of.

Yeah it took a 2 months pay to build my toy, but I love it and probably won't have to buy another computer for another 5-8 years. If Moore's Law is true on electronics then there won't be too much incentive to upgrade my machine until the gap in performance is really big.