FRAPS now has cached recording

[Tankbuster 1747]

This is going to be especially good news for all you frustrated xfire users who really miss the cached screen recording feature.

What is it? FRAPS can now 'remember' the previous 30 seconds of recording without actually writing it to a file. This means you can turn this feature (by pressing and holding the record button) and leave it on, but FRAPS won't actually make any recording until you press the record button again at which point it writes to it's record file *everything that happened in the 30 secs before you pressed it again*.

Now you'll never miss that important moment because you can't afford the disk space to leave FRAPS recording all the time.

There's a price to pay, of course, it's only available to registered users and on my q9550/8800GTX, it does drag the frame rate down, but I hope some tweaking will mitigate some of that.

http://www.fraps.com/

[Quincey 10]

Sounds lovely, but is the performance hit the same as if you were recording (and writing)?

[Tankbuster 1747]

Oddly enough, the FPS hit was WORSE using the cache feature, but I'm sure that can be ironed out in updates to the program and some client tweaking. Of course, caching means it's not actually recording to file so it's not gobbling up disk space.

The dude who gave me the heads up (Thanks Tankus), said his i740 system doesn't even notice it, but my 9550 @3.3 + 8800GTX does struggle. Your mileage may vary.:)

It's this player's opinion that 30 seconds is WAY to much and this length should be at most 15 secs and even better, settable by user.

[HuNtA 0]

It'd give you a worse performance slowdown as caching the file will fill up your RAM, which ArmA also needs quite desperately

[celery 8]

The thing that fraps needs most badly is reduce the crazy degradation of fps. You can't do anything you wanted to record in the first place with such a low and stuttering fps.

[Tankbuster 1747]

The thing that fraps needs most badly is reduce the crazy degradation of fps. You can't do anything you wanted to record in the first place with such a low and stuttering fps.

When the application is running but idle, it has very little overhead. If you expect it to have no effect on your system when it's actually recording, you're wishing on a star.

---------- Post added at 12:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:58 PM ----------

It'd give you a worse performance slowdown as caching the file will fill up your RAM, which ArmA also needs quite desperately

I realise that, but here's the odd thing. My friend who jas 4 gig of ddr3 and an i7, got better performance than I did with 6 gig of ddr2 and a core 2 quad.

[enad 11]

Yeah my FPS will go for 60 down to 17 almost exactly every time and it will only fluctuate from 17 to 19. So its basically impossible to record in ArmA II for me. :(

I dont understand how Richiespeed does it. And hes got a dual core!

[Tankbuster 1747]

I put FRAPS in cache mode and found myself playing the game at 12 FPS, a total sludge fest.

I'd hope that Beepa will tweak this aspect of the application. As I said earlier, if we could control the time length of the cache, I'd be happy with only 10 seconds and that would hopefully reduce the system pwnage.

I think we have to accept that when we are recording, we have to live without much of the eye candy we'd want otherwise. Much of this stuff will be mulched by youtube encoding anyway, so I'm going to record half screen size, turn off all the PP and AA, put the record frame rate down to 20 and see how it goes.

Have you tried the framerate lock thingy? I'm not sure what that does.

[enad 11]

Well it seems basically the only way you can record while maintaining good quality ingame, is having a very powerful video card with a very low res. Even with my 4870X2, I cant record, but that's probably due to my res...which is 2048X1152. :/

[Tankbuster 1747]

Even with my 4870X2, I cant record, but that's probably due to my res...which is 2048X1152. :/

What's the opposite of crosseyed? Cos that what I've gone thinking about your screen res! :D

I'm emailed beepa, asking for a controllable cache and for optimisation for our game. I'll post any further correspondence here.

[enad 11]

Hey, it looks nice that's all that matters. :)

And...Okay sounds good.

[HuNtA 0]

With any game using fraps, the key is to turn down the resolution to your planned output (1920x1200 video is nearly the same resolution used in digital cinema projectors); I'm a media technology student and make videos of all kinds of sizes, and even on a high power editing rig 2k/1080HD is hard enough to work with, let alone record

[Tankbuster 1747]

Beepa support said as much Hunta, thanks.

They've forwarded my request for a configurable cache time to their developers for consideration for addition to a future version.