Recording With Fraps

[genius757]

Here are my Specs..... Intel pentium 4 ( 3.40) ghz , 2 Gigs of DDR ram, ICEQ 3 512mb graphics,

It records fine with any other game, But i have tried numerous configurations with my system in FRAPS to try to record Fofix smoothly ( almost real time), Nothing Seems to Work! IMO i should be able to record smoothly in the minimal resolution , Half-sized , and in Windowed Mode, But that seems not to work either ( Almost There ) But not quite. Is itr safe to say that I will not get the ( RealTime Recording as smooth as I want it ) Unless I throw In Another 2 More Gigs? Or Upgrade To DDR2? Iv'e Heard that if Im Not Using DDR2 that it is just a waste of my time trying to record FOF.

[Davidrawr]

Your main problem is that you're running a Pentium 4. They were good CPUs back in the 90's, however nowadays applications are using more and more processing power. FoFiX has a lot of audio processing to do, much more than you can see on screen. FRAPS uses a lot of your CPU too creating and compressing video files from your game window output.

To put it simply your processor is lagging behind with all of the number crunching needed to run both FoFiX and FRAPS. no amount of graphical reduction is going to help much in that department I'm afraid.

Not only this, but your hard disk may be lacking in the RPM department, and as FoFiX and FRAPS do a hell of a lot of read/write work (especially FRAPS) this may also be contributing to your choppy gameplay while recording.



Tl;dr: no other way to put it I'm afraid, if you want to record with FRAPS you'll need a system upgrade. Other recording software may be another option but I'm pretty sure with the amount of CPU usage the game eats that you'll lag with anything else on that processor.

[Ambiguity]

FRAPS uses a lot of your CPU too creating and compressing video files from your game window output.

Not that it really matters, but I thought FRAPS doesn't compress the video file 'cause it'd be too hard to do on the fly. I thought that was why a 3min video in FRAPS ends up saving with a 4gb filesize(maybe a little exaggerated, but I think it's at least 1 gig). *shrugs*

[Davidrawr]

IIRC FRAPS doesn't make completely raw video files, they're still compressed, just as little as possible. And yeah you're right, depending on your resolution and settings in FRAPS a minute or two of video file takes up about 3.4 gig.