Fraps issues

[Jamesmadison]

so i downloaded the trial version of fraps... then uninstalled it because of its lack of usefulness... and now i have the full version but when i lcick on it to open it wont work. i hear i need to delete something in my registry, could anyone tell me what exactly?

[Chip]

My bro just downloaded it... Try deleting every thing to do with fraps and re-install it..

I have the fraps 99 havnt tried it but my bro has and it looks sweet

[Jamesmadison]

nah i need to know what exatcly to delete from the registry tho

[SaborWolf]

once you guys figure out how you get fraps to stop cutting framerates from 60 and 70 to a slideshow, let me know =)

AMD Athlon 2800
gig of ram
X850 Pro w/ 256 ...

everything i can possibly throw onto my computer will run at whatever my refresh rate is ... until i run fraps to record

[Excel]

Get 2 SCISI 15k rpm HDDs in RAID 0 :p

Record in fullsize since it's faster and play the game in 800*600 and there you have it.

[Abernus]

I am also having trouble using Fraps. I have bought the program and am starting to think it was a waste of money. When recording the game the whole gam,e slows down to a slide show and the playback of the footage is very bad (slideshow) I have used VirtualDub to shrink the files and still the playback is bad. Here is the setting used:

Desktop: 1280 * 1024
Dame Screen: Windowed

Fraps set to: 60 FPS for voideo capture (tried all setting though and same result)

PC:
CPU: AMDXP 3000+
Ram: 1Gb
Video: XFX6800 GT
Also the game is played on a hard drive connected via IDE and the footage is recorded by a HDD on a ATA connected HDD

Has anyone got any suggestions on how to clean up the recording, or any suggestions on what other software to use to get better quality?

Thanks in advance.

[mss smwht]

Desktop: 1280 * 1024
i think that is your problem. if you're running the game anywhere near that... you're in trouble. some calculations for you:

1280*1024 is 1.3 MP. those of you with older digital cameras probably know this. now: consider the size of a single frame. fraps, i believe, now uses a proprietary compression scheme. uncompressed, *each* frame is 3.75 mb, or 3,936,256 bytes. 60 frames per second gives you 236,175,360 bytes, or 225.23 mb/s. let's see your hard drive do that. IDE is capped at 133mb/s, SATAII (well, not actually SATAII. it is SATA, but at 2x the speed) is capped at 300mb/s. since you have IDE, your throughput is capped at 133mb/s (best case). 225mb/s > 133 mb/s. and that is absolute best case... the good drives do ~50mb/s sustained (in linear read/write operations, random seeking cuts it to about 1/4 of that)

that is why fraps now has compression; it cuts the bitrate a good bit so your "average computer" can keep up with 800x600 or 1024x768 (for the faster ones) the compression itself takes CPU power away from the game (hurts framerate, especially in your case where the CPU is probably a bottleneck already) and still requires the 225mb/s of stuff to go somewhere. this is the memory. this also cuts your performance (i'd guess you have pc3200 on that axp, meaning your memory bandwidth is somewhere around 2.5gb/s actually, the game uses a surprising amount of this) despite the compression, 1280x1024 is usually not realistically doable. getting greater than 4:1 compression is no small feat. 1024x768 is much easier to work with, containing only 786k pixels and thus coming in at 3/5 the size of 1280x1024 for a frame. for 60fps recording (uncompressed) at 1024x768, "only" 135mb/s is required. this is a lot easier to deal with through compression. even uncompressed, you are almost under the limit for IDE.

so 1024x768 is probably a "good" res to record at. also, consider dropping to 30fps, as this cuts the needed bandwidth in half.

i'm guessing most of you skipped some or all of that. in that case, allow me to present a summary:
1280*1024 makes your computer a sad panda. 1024*768 is a much more manageable res. 30 fps is easier to work with than 60 fps.

to answer your other question (i think):
virtualdub -> xvid compression once you have the video captured. works for me.

(wow that was a lot to type...)

[Abernus]

WOW, thanks for the very informative post mss smwht. I think I will give Fraps a try tonight at 800 * 600 and see how it goes. I have tried recording at 30 FPS but still not to good. Besides from reading your post looks like I will be dropping the screen res to record.

However I have been doing some diggin on recording software and found one called GameCam: LINKY (http://www.planetgamecam.com/). As with Fraps this is not free software but the trial version does record well in my original desktop res and doesn't hurt Frame rate either :)

I am going to do some more playing about with Both Fraps and GameCam.

Thanks for all the help so far mss smwht :happy34: :happy34: