Guide to recording without loss of frame rate?

[xSquirtle]

So for a long time, I have been wanting to recording my video game sessions and compile them into a video of my own. The problem is that the frame rate loss is far to great and really effects me.

What are some hardware or software tweaks that I could buy/do in order to get smoother game play while I record? I get roughly 200-300+fps in Planetside, but once I hit up fraps, I get roughly 100fps with stuttering slow reaction times.

My specs are as followed:
i7 3.2ghz
8 gb ram
460 GTX OC

[Vancha]

How many HDDs do you have? If you're trying to play on and record to the same HDD, that'll be your problem.

[xSquirtle]

That's not the problem.

[Vancha]

What are the make/models of your HDDs/SSDs?

Another suggestion is setting FRAPS to run on a single core of your CPU. Apparently that helps.

[Goku]

I wish we had a guy that knew about all the streaming/recording questions we get. I don't know anything on this at all :(.

[Phyrefli]

All things being equal, the quickest way to improve framerates while recording is to record to a separate HDD (or several, if possible).

I do a lot of video recording using Dxtory, and adding that second HDD made a difference.

The other question is what settings are you using in FRAPS? If you're trying to get FRAPS to record at the same speed as you're playing, it'll slow things down tremendously. However if you're trying to record at 30 FPS, then provided your HDD's are fast enough it really shouldn't impact the framerate as much as it is.

[xSquirtle]

I have 4 7200rpm 2tb HD's. It does not matter where I tell it to save the movie clips, I still get bad lag while recording.

[NePaS]

FRAPS is terrible for that.

Use MSI Afterburner,it can monitor your temps,overclock your card,record video(with only a 5 fps drop) and take pictures.It works on ANY graphics card.If the videos are to be used for Youtube,you can save some space and render time by setting afterburner to record at 30fps,as that is all Youtube does anyway.(your gameplay is unaffected)

My settings:

Video Format: MJPG Compression
Quality: 85%
Frame size: 16.9 720p
Framerate 30fps
Frametrate Limit: Disabled
Enable Gamma correction: check box is ticked

not had any problems with recording yet.

Link to latest version: http://downloads.guru3d.com/Afterburner-2.2.1-download-2562.html

[Vancha]

I have 4 7200rpm 2tb HD's. It does not matter where I tell it to save the movie clips, I still get bad lag while recording.

Did you try the CPU cores thing?

[DarkChiron]

So for a long time, I have been wanting to recording my video game sessions and compile them into a video of my own. The problem is that the frame rate loss is far to great and really effects me.

What are some hardware or software tweaks that I could buy/do in order to get smoother game play while I record? I get roughly 200-300+fps in Planetside, but once I hit up fraps, I get roughly 100fps with stuttering slow reaction times.

My specs are as followed:
i7 3.2ghz
8 gb ram
460 GTX OC

My specs are incredibly lower than yours and I don't get lag when recording with Fraps. I can record SkyRim at 24 FPS consistently with no lag. Something you could try (just for fun) is to have Fraps lock the recording FPS (to like 30, say) and see what happens at that point. I also know, with older games like that, there can sometimes be issues with how recording software in general interacts with them. For instance, when I was recording Deus Ex, it did not take kindly to recording, causing the game to run at one rate, the recording running at another, and then everything displayed improperly, stuttered, and the recording ended up looking bad as well.

[duomaxwl]

You can use Dxtory with the UT codec. It's fast, doesn't kill your FPS like FRAPS, and if you are cool with 720p you don't even need a RAID0 setup. Dxtory can also do DirectOutput to like Xsplit if that's your thing. With the i7, you may be able to do 1080p. When I was using FRAPs the biggest thing that improve performance for me was running FRAPs on a different HDD than the game, and RAID0'ing two HDDs. It also let's you choose your microphone as a seperate audio so it's not intertwined with your video audio (shows up as 2 audio tracks in Vegas.)

Edit: Also, unlike FRAPS, you can custom choose a resolution by pixels OR by percentage (instead of FULL or HALF) and it doesn't lock up your framerate like FRAPs does (if so high, stays 60, if it goes so low, goes to 30 crap.)

[Naz The Eternal]

I use FRAPS and in my opinion it is the best RAW footage and quality you can get from any recording software I've used...

Here is an amazing guide that I used to set up FRAPS for BF3 on Ultra, have a go at it, might be what you're looking for

Edite: I'm an idiot and forgot to post the link, lol here it is

http://frapsforum.com/threads/best-fraps-performance-tips-afaik.559/

[Vancha]

I use FRAPS and in my opinion it is the best RAW footage and quality you can get from any recording software I've used...

Here is an amazing guide that I used to set up FRAPS for BF3 on Ultra, have a go at it, might be what you're looking for
My psychic powers appear to be on the fritz. Got a link?

[Naz The Eternal]

My psychic powers appear to be on the fritz. Got a link?

lol, link included :groovy:

[xSquirtle]

ugh, its useless for me. First recording I do, seems smooth enough at first, but immediately after that my computer begins to get severely laggy without the recorder on. The reaction time in game is severely reduced, making the game impossible to play at my full potential.

[Naz The Eternal]

ugh, its useless for me. First recording I do, seems smooth enough at first, but immediately after that my computer begins to get severely laggy without the recorder on. The reaction time in game is severely reduced, making the game impossible to play at my full potential.

Not sure what's going on here, seems like a hard drive issue, getting choked somewhere along the line.

What kind of HDD are you recording to?

[Vancha]

Could it be a memory leak? What games have you tried recording where this happens?

Also I figure I'll ask, what version of Fraps are you running?

[Ailos]

I have 4 7200rpm 2tb HD's. It does not matter where I tell it to save the movie clips, I still get bad lag while recording.

If all 4 are in a RAID 0 setup, your RAID controller could be screwing things up for you, especially if it's an older SATA 1.5 or even a 3 GB/s chip (which it sounds like it might be).

Simple fix might be to try updating BIOS and chipset drivers to latest revision. A more cumbersome thing to try would be to split them up into 2 pairs, but then, obviously you're going to need to re-install everything.