Alternative to Fraps?

Yo guys,

I was playing Just Cause 2 before (totally awesome game, just like GTA IV but waaay more fun), and I wanted to record some videos of the game at max settings, probably an average of 55 FPS during gameplay (16x AF, 8x AA) and I started using Fraps. As soon as I turned it on, performance dropped rapidly to about 10 - 25 FPS, which was stupid really.

So my question is what can I use as an alternative to FRAPS (so I can record videos of gameplay), or what settings should I put on FRAPS, so I can record pretty close to the FPS I get.

Cheers

 

Yeah Fraps halfs most of the FPS you see originally, i don't know about recording stuff in the background on a computer, but for only showing FPS ingame i use RadeonPro. So you might use any standard capturing software. Of course you have to have some ressource on the cpu while recording i assume.

Edit: As i'm not that familiar with fraps settings, more with encoding video files. If there is an option to record uncompressed, i'm sure it could help improve framerate in the game, though it will also greatly up the size of your videos, so you might have to encode them later to a smaller size.

 

Somebody in one of the MOH gaming threads recommeded this app to me as a FRAPS alternative, but I never tried it. If you try it let us know how it works as I use FRAPS myself.

WeGame, a free Fraps alternative - Record Games, Capture Games, Game Record, and much more!

 

Yea I have RadeonPro, and for some reason, the FPS do NOT show via RadeonPro in Just Cause 2. Even if the option is checked ala BC2, where it does show (although mine has a considerable difference to some users).

I might try WeGame, but I'd like to see more opinions/options first!

 

You can do some things to really improve how your system responds to Fraps. Fraps is primarily CPU-bound, but it is also quite demanding on the disk system particularly for higher resolution captures.

The big thing is setting the processor affinity. Start your game and Fraps up (don't start recording yet). Run Task Manager, then go to the Processes tab. Find the game's process and right-click it, then select "Set Affinity...". If you get an error saying "Access is denied" then click the button at the bottom of the window to "Show processes from all users". This will elevate permissions of Task Manager so that you can alter the appropriate settings. In the Processor Affinity dialog, you will want to UNCHECK CPU 0, 1, 6 and 7. This will cause your game to avoid the first CPU (both 0 and 1 share the same physical core), which is where your operating system runs the vast majority of system services and where other programs will run by default. Avoiding that core will prevent the game from interfering with disk I/O among other things (Fraps causes a LOT of disk I/O). Do the same thing with the Fraps process, except ONLY check the affinity boxes for CPU 6 and 7.

The above steps will prevent the game and Fraps from contending with each other for CPU access, and will also prevent them from fighting with the operating system for it. You will need to repeat this procedure every time you run the programs or restart your computer - it does not remember the affinity settings. Also, if your game is not really using all of CPU 2, 3, 4, 5 (if the % utilization on those cores is under 50% average), then you could shift 4 and 5 over to Fraps too.

To improve disk performance, the best thing is to have a seperate drive that only Fraps is writing to. Not just an extra partition in an existing drive - you want a dedicated device for it. Higher sequential write speeds are better - Fraps will be writing out massive chunks of sequential data.

You will want a seperate physical drive especially if you are using standard HDD drives (and not SSD). There is only one head in a HDD and it can only be in one place at a time.