I use Fraps for a recording software. When I'm alone I get anywhere from 80-90 frames a second, and when I record it drops to 12 or so. This seems like a ridiculous drop and I was wondering if there's any setting changes or fixes for the problem.
It's normal that you get a FPS drop when recording.
Try to shut down every other app running but Fraps and LFS.
If this still doesn't work, and you still wanna make a good video two solutions :
- Either you record it slowmo, and you accelerate the pace later on on Virtual dub or windows movie maker.
- Either you lower your graphics settings (antialisating, texture filtering and resolution mainly). Anyway, if you want to put this video on stream, the quality will be lowered, so you won't lose much doing this
Im a little bit of a techy myself I might be able to help,
When recording with frasp make sure your not recordiong in full screen, thats kills your fps, check off a lower fps captur rate, something like 25 or so, NVIDIA 6200 isnt the best card, so make sure your graphics are turned down to low, and as before close all other progs like msn XFIRE w/e to free up resources.
With using Fraps, I personally don't have an issue, one thing that helped me was a fast hard drive (a 2nd one) and make sure your swap file (Virtual memory or paging file) is not on the disk you are recording to. Fraps is generally fairly resource non-intensive as the codec is a fairly low loss .avi format, requiring very little in the way of compression and processing.
If you are taking a video for a generic unbranded media sharing website, for sharing via email or to play on a TV then you can lower the resolution of LFS easily to 640x480 without noticing a drop in quality in the final video, as the process of compressing the video will get rid of most of this quality itself...
RAM is very important when recording/editing video, and although 512MB is adequate for low spec recording, doubling this will have more than double the effect on the recordng (imagine Windows uses a total of 64MB, LFS uses 128MB and you've got another 64MB given to background processes like firewalls and antivirus, this leaves 256MB for the recording process, 256MB for a fraps video is actually not that long (it being low loss) so another 512MB will increase the amount of RAM available by about 3x, it will also, as long as you're using the same speed RAM, allow for load sharing across the RAM sticks and improve response time, unless you have maxxed out the speed on stick)
Again try to lower the spec as far as possible, but avoid running with compressed texures, as this will increase load on the processor (although freeing up RAM). If you have Anti-virus, turn off on-access scanning as this will check your replay files as they are being written, which again maxes out the processor load and fills up the RAM.
I run a system that needs to be replaced but has no issues recording videos....
Athlon 64 3200+ (running slightly clocked 2.2GHz (Pentium rated 3.6GHz)
1GB Corsair XMS DDR (400MHz)
Radeon X800 XT (256MB VRAM)
Asus GTi Turbo Uberflinging Megaujamaflipping Lightyear motherboard (I forget what model it is, so I made up a similar model name)
a IDE ATA 133 HDD
a SATA Promise HDD
Fraps have a little issue with nVidia cards. There are some games which if you record with 32bits of color, fps are very very low even if you have a super computer. And yeah, LFS is one of those games.
Set the game to 16bits when recording and fps should be higher.
Anyway, a dual core cpu helps a lot doing this task, but a 3000+ should be able IMO
I fixed it! I realised I was getting around 39 FPS ingame, and I was like "Wtf?!". I was playing around in the Misc. Options and found sometihng called "Minimum sleep." No idea what it does, but it somehow affects my FPS. It's in a milliseconds variable, between 20 and 1.
20 - 39 FPS
1 - 120 FPS!
Putting minimum sleep on one puts my recording FPS at 24, which is 48 FPS doubled.
My brother is gonna sell me his rig for 250 bucks.
Lets say I run LFS at 1280*1024, and then I record half size (640*512) - 75% of image is actually lost, and so was generated for nothing. Makes much more sense to run at something like 800*600, but set it to full size, making a 800*600 recording, as no power is "wasted" drawing pixels that wont end up in the video.
yep - always record in 640X480 or at the biggest 800X600. My machine is half decent still but any res bigger than this and it starts to struggle. Not the graphics card, memory or processor. It's the disk I/O that causes the problem. The write rate simply cannot keep up with the amount of data generated by FRAPS when using the larger screen resolutions.
Nah, a partition still uses the same physical drive. It's the drive itself that causes the issues.
There is a maximum read/write speed to the drive, having a partition still means you're chasing back and forth over the same drive with your Page file (virtual RAM), LFS files and the fraps recording.
The best setup is to run two (or three) seperate drives/arrays ideally on different controllers, too, but the controllers won't be too much of a bottleneck....
Spot on, also, probably best to make sure while recording your Pagefile (Virtual Memory) is on the same drive as LFS...
It is also VERY important you have as little load on the PC as possible (close down as many processes as possible, especially Firefox windows or Internet Exploder windows
What is this thread? Try to sound techy by taking wild guesses?
To clear some things up:
No, fraps doesn't use a lot of RAM, only about 20 to 30 MB. 512 MB RAM shouldn't be a problem.
No, encoding high resolution video is not easy on the CPU, no matter what codec. At 1280 x 720 x 25 fps fraps uses about 50% of my 2.8 Ghz AMD X2.
Video Data rate is about 20 MB/s so any Hard Drive made in the last few years shouldn't have a problem, unless it's very fragmented.
And among all that "advice" you missed the one that really matters: dual core CPU.
Personally I record at half speed and then double the framerate in virtualdubmod and use the built in stretch filter to fix the audio as well. But if it's for youtube 25 fps is enough.
Hmm, looks like I need to give my day job... (seeing as this is what I do day to day, hour after hour, giving support to people over the phone)
Recording and saving a 500+MB video file will take up more than just 30MB of RAM, but you are right, it is perfectly doable on a PC with just 1GB of RAM, I wouldn't like to try smaller because I find windows alone struggles under less than 512MB
Again, it is possible, by using a low loss codec (saves massive files) you CAN reduce the load on the CPU by a large amount. The CPU is used the most in actually compressing the video, so less compression, bigger file, faster CPU response time, but bigger files, faster disk writing speeds and thus the need for another HDD
See above
Yea, a dual core CPU will help, indeed, however, myself I have not tested this, as I would have to replace my entire PC to run a dual core, whereas a new HDD will cost me less than £30
25-30fps is more than enough for most things, for instance Video tapes are recorded at such rates and it is not obvious when watching these back, and the before mentioned Youtube as well. It is best, is possible, to record at a multiple (or division) of the final devices refresh rate (for instance watching on a 100Hz TV, a framerate of 50 or even25fps would look better than 60fps.....)
Certainly there are faster and slower encoders. I'd guess fraps is about 20 times faster than x264. But 1/20th of a metric shitload is still a lot.
And video is actually recorded at 50/60 fields per second, not 25/30 frames per second. 25/30 only looks smooth when there is a lot of motion blur like in hollywood movies. But for video games and sports 25/30 fps certainly isn't smooth.
