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Whenever I record footage with Fraps, everything will run silky smooth at 60 fps for about an hour or so, but then the framerate will constantly lag at 1-15 fps. This will happen when playing any game. I have plenty of free HDD space.

Here are my PC specs:

AMD Phenom II 3.4Ghz
Radeon HD 6870
8GB DDR3 RAM
Seagate Barracuda 1TB

Here are my Fraps settings:

60 fps
30-sec loop buffer
Lock framerate both on and off

Does anyone know what could be causing this? If not, then what would you suggest as an alternate recording software? (NOT CamStudio or Camtasia)

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2 Answers 2

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Well turns out I discovered the answer to this myself.

Fraps heavily writes to the HDD, and slows down the game if it can't write the videos fast enough. For me, this was because my HDD was becoming rapidly fragmented as Fraps ran over long periods of time (about 10% after 1 hour). This was causing Fraps to not be able to keep up with the action.

From my research, there are two fixes to this:

  • Record to a second HDD dedicated to Fraps
  • Set Fraps to record at a lower resolution or lower framerate. For instance, record at 30fps, but turn off framerate lock so the game isn't reduced to 30fps (probably the best solution).
  • Take a break every time Fraps decides to slow down, and defrag your disk.

I hope this helps someone out in the future!

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I'm using Xsplit, for streaming/ recording some of my gaming session. It's work fine, and a lot of Starcraft 2 caster use it.

I'm not sure Xsplit produce better video or not. But you can give a try

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  • It seems to me like Xsplit is meant for live streaming. Not as a replacement for Fraps.
    – rshea0
    Commented Feb 13, 2012 at 6:32
  • 2
    Xsplit can also do local game capture, which it encodes on the fly to H264 using considerably less Hard-disk I/O and instead uses more CPU. Since many computer games do not use a CPU to its full capacity, this can often go unnoticed while playing computer games, and as result you get a much smaller file size.
    – grufftech
    Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 20:13

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