Fraps skips when I record in games

hey, everything I try to record ingame footage with fraps it records fine for like the first minute, then it starts skipping constantly like small freezes, my FPS stays the same while recording so I don't know what could be causing it..

I think there's a pause between when you press the button and when it actually starts recording (and utilizing your computers horsepower). So my guess is once it starts actually recording, that's when you notice this skipping. And if that's the case, it would mean your PC isn't powerful enough

Try recording to a different hard disk (not a partition, a completely different disk). Fraps is pretty intensive with disk usegage and you may be running into a bottleneck.

what are your CPU/mem/vid card stats? I had these issues with fraps when i had a x2 system with a 3850 and 2gb RAM. Issues went away with vid card upgrade to 8800gt.

I found out when I'm recording at 30FPS, and I see the 30FPS bar at top it's completely smooth, but then out of nowhere it'll drop to 29 for one second then back up to 30, and every time it does that it gives me a small freeze, and it starts continuously doing that at random, then stopping and being smooth for a while..

It does this on 3 game I've tried it on: BF2, Gunz, BF2142

Here's my specs:
CPU
AMD Althon 64 X2 Dual Core 5000+
Motherboard
foxconn nforce 590 SLI
Memory
2GB DDR2 800
Graphics Card
Evga 8800GT SC
OS
Windows XP Professional
Hard Drive
Samsung Spinpoint SP2504C 250GB

Edit// @Demon, could it be my harddrive being too slow? Because fraps did this before, and I just got done reinstalling my OS a month ago (not cause of fraps lol) and it still does it

Yeah, a slow hard drive will give you horrible fraps performance. If you only experience this when your framerate drops, it sounds like it's a resource problem. Maybe something in the background is using up more system resources, or possibly even the game is working harder and needs to take resources from fraps.

Check to make sure you're using a new version of fraps. I know they added dual cpu/dual core support a few versions back. It really helped.

ya fraps is not very efficient and uses your cpu and hd like mad! i had this issue when using raid 0 as my game drive but also recording fraps to it, fraps pegged one of my cores to %100 (q6600 @ 3ghz)

Fraps tends to use the HDD and CPU most, if you're getting stuttering after a certain amount of time it's possible you just need to defrag your hard drive, with a slower hard drive writing to contiguous segments will probably be ok, but when it has to seek all over the place due to being fragmented that could cause issues.

Other than that, check stability of your CPU, run prime95 torture tests one seperate for each core of your CPU and see if you get any errors after a while.

usually its hd or vid card issue.

Unless your settings are totally tweaked (like, 16x AA or something) it's almost definitely the HDD causing this. My understanding of how FRAPS outputs data is that it basically does a screencap of as many frames (up to 30) per second that it can, then parses the output into an AVI (although, the last time I used FRAPS, years ago, it only output a raw directory of JPGs). That explanation is in line with seeing your framerate drop even by 1 FPS and then running into a hiccup - by the time you've seen that the system can't sustain the framerate, it's already hit the bottleneck.

My advice would be to get a 2nd drive and RAID0 the two, should eliminate that bottleneck, although it introduces potential system issues (i.e., increased possibility of data loss). You could also try just getting a faster drive (with at least 16MB cache) and creating an entirely separate partition in Windows to output the data to, or, if you don't want to buy any new hardware, just lower the quality of the output a bit.

You might try recording a demo from within the game, then use fraps to record the demo since your system will not be thinking about the game nearly as much.

What are your settings for recording video?

Ripskin said:

You might try recording a demo from within the game, then use fraps to record the demo since your system will not be thinking about the game nearly as much.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that is what I'm doing currently

@Kuya, It doesn it with almost all settings, 30fps/29fps/60fps, 1280x1024 640x480 lol

@FinalGT, I actually do have another hard drive here, it's a 500GB 16MB Cache Sata/300 Seagate this one here: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=b9df99f4fa74c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

do you think that'd be enough to fix the problem if it is the problem? I'll reinstall that harddrive in my system later

The current harddrive I'm using only has 8MB Cache


@Frostex

Ermm, I never ran prime95 or orthos before, but I did today and I watched my CPU Temps on each core go from 45 to 70 in CoreTemp, but in Everest home they stayed the same 50-55 I don't know if coretemp is faulty but that is definitely way to high O.O I did run tests for 5 minutes and didn't get any errors though, if both Core 0 and Core 1 went to 70heat then that means their both working right? Cause I thought maybe both of my cores arn't working lol






Thanks for the help everyone

Well since you're getting errors only after a set amount of time, and you're getting it with the CPU under more than normal load it suggested to me maybe an overheating problem with the CPU, prime95 just stresses the CPU as much as it can, running it for 5 minutes isn't really enough to test stability ideally you want to leave it for a good few hours or maybe overnight.

I'd be more inclined to think it's the hard drive though, have you tried defragging?

Thank you guys!! It was my harddrive doing it, I got the other harddrive install and told fraps to record to it, didn't get the glitch at all, so I tried switching back and forth between recording, my old one does it, my new hard drive is not.

Thanks again for the help guys!