FRAPS

[Stephane LI]

Hi,

I am trying to do some videos using Fraps. But as soon as I start capturing the panels, my FPS dramatically drop to 5-7 FPS (indicated on the upper left of the frame). Any idea why ? and how can I do some movies without using an iPhone filming my screen ?

Stephane

[Felix]

Sorry I'm no FRAPS expert. But maybe you can try Dxtory?

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Something in your PC must eat the considerable number of display pixels, stuff them in a buffer, compress them live to MPEG4 or better, and write them to disk. This will inevitably eat mucho CPU.

You can try to reduce the compression factor to just 1.0 (no compression) and hope your disk won't fill up. After the flight recording you can then compress the huge file at your leisure to get something more manageable.


Hoppie

[Matt Sheil]

I used FRAPs during PSX testing, worked fine, it must be something else on your computer interfering.   Does it do it with other program's?

[John Golin]

There are a lot of variables, usually it comes down to graphic card support for the particular application - in this case OpenGL.

Do you have other OpenGL programs (XPlane?) with which you can compare performance?

[Phil Bunch]

Try using system monitoring tools - CPU usage should tell you what else is eating your machine.  Recent versions of Windows comes with some useful monitoring tools.  In Windows 7, it's called "Resource Monitor", and some independent monitoring apps are also available.

In Windows 7, the shortcuts are usually here:

C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Accessories\\System Tools

Also, perhaps the people in one of the FSX-oriented forums could offer some help - they use FRAPS frequently, I believe.