G`Day i purchased the full version of fraps, however when i use it the framerates on my games whether it be il2 or fs2004 slow right down to exactly 9 ( down from the set rate of 25 for fs2004, for instance)..am i doing something wrong? is there anyway i can improve the framerate?

cheers

Depends on many factors, but one that I use is to play the action sequence I want at 1/4 speed and capture it with Fraps.

Then when I place it on the timeline, I speed it up 4x or 400% to make the clip play at the correct speed.

Others use different techniques, but I find for me, that I get a smooth video from this method, check here to see what I mean of a smooth video:

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=400102&f=23110...501071416#6501071416

I am assuming too that you have a reasonably fast system, and also what resolution are you trying to capture at? Deepnding on your system 640x480 may be your limit, I can safely to 1152x864.

I managed to create movies on an old Athlon 1.4, Nvidia MX440 with 1Gb Ram but using a 7200rpm Hard Drive.

The hard-drive was also seperate from the install drive so that the data could stream straight to it, rather than the one the game was installed on.

Hope that helps a little.

Any more questions, just ask.

Cheers, MP.

Make sure you have a high speed HDisk and save the Fraps stream to the OS disk, if you have more than one disk (this gets around the OS having to switch accesses to different disks, which is time consuming, when speed is critical).

Record at lower resolutions or lower your game video settings. Also make sure there are no unnecessary background processes running, and as Mistic says..

It seems that the advice is contradictory: MP seems to say set FRAPS to write/stream to a drive other than the install-drive (Normally C:\)

K_Fred seems to say to set FRAPS to write/stream to the OS drive (always C:\)

Can either or both of you address this matter...or explain how I am (probably) misreading the advice given.

Thanks.

From what I understand, the best way is to record to a separate hard drive from the OS drive. The OS hard drive has data transferring to its hard drive in addition to Fraps. Recording to a seperate hard drive allows all the bandwidth to and from that hard drive to be used for your application. It's the same issue as when I compose with my sequencer. The sample player in the sequencer is reading 100's and 1000's of MBs while playing or recording and it needs all the bandwidth it can chug down to perform properly... that means putting the 100GBs of samples on a separate hard drive.

That's my understanding.

MrVH

hi mercanario,

what mystic and vh said is probably the more efficient way to save high bandwidth streams.

to be more detailed, the system will load the needed libraries first into the ram, next is the game (and 'fraps', which is just very few consuming itself) when you start it. however, the adresses of the files loaded, will be blocked and the ata/sata-channel (of the harddrive, where the system- and game-files are located) is therefor reduced in bandwidth.
demands and requests of the system during capture have no effect on the channel-bandwidth though.

anyway, even if you have enough ram to reduce swapping to a minimum, there is a constant data-flow between the system-/game-drive and the bus, also the drive will be instantly show fragmentation due to the reading/writing.
a separarate, clean drive only for data writing will make sure, the stream doesn't have to check for free clusters.

a real speed-advantage is to be obtained by connecting the data-drive (for capturing) on a separate channel as master-drive. on older ata-systems you have only limited choices with 2 channels and each master and slave configuration. it would be a good solution to have one drive connected to the first channel master, the second to the 2nd channel master (and a possible dvd-burner to slave).
on sata-systems it is easier, as all drives have their own channel on the controller.
also raid-configurations may speed-up data-transfers, but they include the risk of losing data, as soon as one drive of the raid fails.

Ta for clearing that up, Deepo.

I was getting confused too as to the best place to send the captured data.

All clear now

I am having the same problem. Mercanario does not indicated that he is capturing anything while this is happening. I am having the same problem.

Just running Fraps, and not capturing anything at all, several graphics programs slow way down. IrfanView Image Viewer; Visual Basic 6; TouchBuddy/TB Toolkit; IL2... I have not tested other games or apps yet.

Apps run very slowly, then I close Fraps from the System Tray, and they run 75% faster. I have the latest Omega drivers for my System. I still need to do some testing in Safe Mode and test other graphics apps to figure this out.

My System:
3.0ghz cpu; 1gig ram; ATI Radeon 9700 128meg graphics card; WinXP Pro.

hi wild bill,

that is indeed strange... could you check with 'taskmanager', how much ressources 'fraps' demands on your system?
for me it doesn't use any cpu and is adressing about 5mb of memory. this doesn't change whatever other applications i open or use. please have a look also, if by accident you have given 'fraps' a high priority (default is default)

Hi deepo,

Fraps is only using 7,364k of Memory, and 00 of the cpu (I assume that is percentage). This is just when it's sitting in the System Tray not doing anything.

I have not changed anything about how it runs. I just checked it Priority and it is set to Normal. But the Processor Affinity is set to only use CPU 1. I checked several other apps and they are set to use both CPU 0 & 1. I set Fraps to use both cpus, that that didn't help.

hi wild bill,

strange, i don't know why this behaviour occurs?
are you on windows xp? i will try to search for similar problems, but anyway, if you find something out, pls tell about it.

I kind of figured it out. It was my Computer Associates EZAntiVirus causing the problem I'm pretty sure now.

In my TB Toolkit App, and VB6 Dev environments, when fraps is loaded, just sitting in the systray, they run very slowly. But when I unload Fraps they run fine. Also, if I just leave Fraps running, but put my AV on Snooze, they work fine as well.

Since I think I figured it out, I tried playing IL2 with Fraps running again last night, but this time, Fraps did not slow the game down. So, it doesn't seem consistient. But at least I 'think' I know the problem and how to fix it the next time it does happen.... I'll just Snooze my AV and see if that fixes it.

Other than Snoozing my AV, I don't know how to tell the AV & Fraps to behave nicely. In the firewall at least you can tell it to let certain apps run with no hassles. But with the AV, I don't see any options.

Guess I still need to look on CA EZAntiVirus website to see if there is a way to fix this.

WBK