HDD Setup for Fraps

[1Kurgan1]

Well got the comp for frapsing, but been having issues with FPS randomly, so seeing what others think. I got a 128GB SSD for my OS and such, running my games off a 2x 750GB 32MB Cache RAID0 drives setup, and frapsing onto a 2TB 5900RPM 64MB Cache. In BF3 my FPS is uaually great, but sometimes when I die or I am near a tank exploding my FPS will just tank down to 30 and be extremely laggy and not recover (when fraps is on of course). The only fix is to toggle fraps off for a second and back on. Sometimes I'll be at 30fps lagging then toggle off fraps and shoot up to 120+ FPS, a 90 FPS gain. Only thing I can think is it would be the fraps HDD being the bottleneck, just seems weird how it's sporadic and not constant. So trying to decide what type of fraps setup I should go with, something like a single 2tb 7200rpm 64mb cache drive (is the bump up in RPMs really going to stop the bottlenecks), or 2x 1TB 32MB Cache drives in RAID0.

Either way, people who fraps, lets hear what you use, and what ideas you got.

 

[digibucc]

if the hdd is indeed the cause, a higher rpm drive will decrease the lag/bottleneck. for constant write where speed matters, start at 7200 and go up, never below. i have one 5400rpm drive, and it's a backup that rarely gets directly used.

now that being said, the random nature of your stutter makes me question whether it is indeed the hdd. even though there ws death/explosion, fraps just keeps recording to one video, correct?
if it were ending one video and starting another, etc i could understand - but if it's one single recording i don't see why death/explosion causes stutter.
is fraps transcoding? maybe something in the death sequence like the explosion is hard for it to render?

 

[Bambooz]

even though there ws death/explosion, fraps just keeps recording to one video, correct?
if it were ending one video and starting another, etc i could understand - but if it's one single recording i don't see why death/explosion causes stutter.

Fraps always starts recording to a new file after 4GB, which is a total pain in the butt

edit: attachment

 

[Aquinus]

Even on my 3820 @ 4.75ghz, I find that the stutter using a compressed format is very noticeable at 1920x1200. I saved it to two SSDs in RAID-0 which I've hit 1gb/s write on. Todays CPUs might be fast, but compressing high-def video on the fly isn't exactly the easiest task. I would make sure that FRAPS throttles down the game's frame-rate to the rate that it is getting recorded at or if you have the hard drive space and I/O bandwidth, I would just record uncompressed video and use something like MediaCoder to convert it to something a little smaller afterwards.

 

[sapetto]

Or you could just use Dxtory, way better than Fraps

 

[1Kurgan1]

I'm gonna get some gaming in here in a bit I'll have to watch my CPU and see if it spikes in use when ending one clip and starting another. If so that will rule out HDD being the cause, which would make me a bit sad, because theres been numerous deaths caused by lag during a random situation.

Or you could just use Dxtory, way better than Fraps

Reading on this sounds extremely HDD intensive, far more than my 5900 rpm drive could do. Also sounds like it eats up about 7 - 8GB every few minutes of recording, so when I play for 4 - 5 hours my HDD would probably be filled in 2 - 3 hours. But a fraps alternative isn't a bad idea, I tried looking up some others before. But this looks like it would require me to invest money into drives before even thinking about trying it. But thats just what I was seeing on a google search, if you got more info let me know, I'm all ears.

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**EDIT**
Just tried Bandicam for a while. Overall seems better, frames got a bit low a few times, but never into the territory where I just felt useless. Going to have to try out a few others just to see how they work I guess.

 

[MT Alex]

I'm not sure what 2TB HDD you have, but I have read that generally the larger platter size in high capacity drives offsets the slower RPMs. My Samsung 2TB is only 5400, but it's very responsive, I'll have to do an HD Tune comparison between it and my 640 Black.

 

[Asylum]

Get MSI Afterburner and use the recorder on it.

Works great for me and hardly drops my FPS at all.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/MSI-Afterburner-2.2.0-Beta-14-download-2859.html

 

[cadaveca]

Adding a second 2TB drive and making a RAID should give ya about 225MB/s(SSD on SATA 3 Gb/s speeds), with a 4TB capacity. That might fit the bill...

 

[sapetto]

MSI Afterburner is good too Concerning Dxtory i can say that is way better than FRAPS, on my system when i try to record with FRAPS i get lag, fps drops and large files. When i tried Dxtory i was amazed, it has tons of settings including HDD write speed adjustment, custom codecs, custom size and video scaling, multiple audio streams and many more.
I can now record BF3 without any fps drops

 

[Sir B. Fannybottom]

I've found that with slower drives I do loose quite a few FPS, putting it in a raid like Dave said would definitely help. If you have fraps recording multichannel audio when you're not using it, that can cause some lag too,

 

[EmerilLIVE]

I'm gonna get some gaming in here in a bit I'll have to watch my CPU and see if it spikes in use when ending one clip and starting another. If so that will rule out HDD being the cause, which would make me a bit sad, because theres been numerous deaths caused by lag during a random situation.



Reading on this sounds extremely HDD intensive, far more than my 5900 rpm drive could do. Also sounds like it eats up about 7 - 8GB every few minutes of recording, so when I play for 4 - 5 hours my HDD would probably be filled in 2 - 3 hours. But a fraps alternative isn't a bad idea, I tried looking up some others before. But this looks like it would require me to invest money into drives before even thinking about trying it. But thats just what I was seeing on a google search, if you got more info let me know, I'm all ears.

------------------------
**EDIT**
Just tried Bandicam for a while. Overall seems better, frames got a bit low a few times, but never into the territory where I just felt useless. Going to have to try out a few others just to see how they work I guess.

Another alternative is the video capture feature in the MSI Afterburner beta. It supports arbitrary down-sampling to 360p, 280p, 720p, ect. You can select the framerate to record at and can set a framerate limit for the game. It uses MJPEG or a custom compression algo, both of these are more optimized for speed than file size. The files can be large, but you don't need a fast hard drive to maintain the needed write speeds even @1080p60. It's been pretty solid in my limited use.

 

[Kreij]

You could get 4x 512GB SSDs, put them in RAID0 and fraps to that.

 

[LifeOnMars]

I just record at 30fps locked. Smooth as butter on youtube and no lags

 

[1Kurgan1]

Well tried tinkering around with Afterburner today, tried Half Res, 720p, 1080p, 1080p + 80% Quality, and 1080p + 90% Quality. Seems 90% is the way to go, 1080p + 100% the files were a bit too big for my liking, with equal recording time to Fraps the files would have been larger. 80% Quality cut the files size by 80% (I only expect 20%!), and that looked great I would say slightly better than 720p. So I bumped it up to 90% and that was less than half file size and looked as good as 100%, also noticed no FPS drops ever so looks like this is what I'm sticking with.

For filesize reference
1080p + 100% = 3min 30sec 7.3GB
1080p + 90% = 4min 20sec 3.1GB (to give an idea, Fraps 1min 45sec clips are 3.95GB)
1080p + 80% = 3min 41sec 1.4GB

 

[newtekie1]

Even on my 3820 @ 4.75ghz, I find that the stutter using a compressed format is very noticeable at 1920x1200. I saved it to two SSDs in RAID-0 which I've hit 1gb/s write on. Todays CPUs might be fast, but compressing high-def video on the fly isn't exactly the easiest task. I would make sure that FRAPS throttles down the game's frame-rate to the rate that it is getting recorded at or if you have the hard drive space and I/O bandwidth, I would just record uncompressed video and use something like MediaCoder to convert it to something a little smaller afterwards.

Recording using FRAPS or other software like it is a balancing act for sure. On the fly compression lowers the file size, and hence lowers the write speed required for the hard drive you are recording to. However, it also puts a lot of stress on the CPU, as you pointed out.

You can write uncompressed video, but then the file size gets huge and the write speed required for the recording drive is very large. I think it is something like 190MB/s for 1080p video uncompressed, something that no single mechanical drive will do, and it is unlikely that even a RAID0 of two mechanical drives will be able to do. So unless you are writing to SSDs, writing uncompressed FullHD video isn't an option.

Well tried tinkering around with Afterburner today, tried Half Res, 720p, 1080p, 1080p + 80% Quality, and 1080p + 90% Quality. Seems 90% is the way to go, 1080p + 100% the files were a bit too big for my liking, with equal recording time to Fraps the files would have been larger. 80% Quality cut the files size by 80% (I only expect 20%!), and that looked great I would say slightly better than 720p. So I bumped it up to 90% and that was less than half file size and looked as good as 100%, also noticed no FPS drops ever so looks like this is what I'm sticking with.

For filesize reference
1080p + 100% = 3min 30sec 7.3GB
1080p + 90% = 4min 20sec 3.1GB (to give an idea, Fraps 1min 45sec clips are 3.95GB)
1080p + 80% = 3min 41sec 1.4GB

I was going to suggest Afterburner, but since you already found it, no need. The MJPG really does a nice job and balances out the compressing very nicely. I too record at 90% quality and it is almost impossible to tell the difference between an MJPG video from Afterburner and an uncompressed video from FRAPS. And if you are planning to upload to youtube, there definitely is no difference once their compression algorithms get their dirty hands on the video. Youtube's 1080p videos look like hell compared to the original source material.