Just noticed that while I was capturing an FSRecorder playback with FRAPS my FPS dropped from the locked 30FPS that I consistently get to 19 or 20 or even less. Do others have the same experience with fraps? Is there an alternative to FRAPS that won't kill the FPS. What about MSI Afterburner. I hear that has a feature that makes a video of what's on screen? Is it better than FRAPS?

Action! is another but never tried it myself.

I never really paid attention to it, but I've heard and read about Fraps being an FPS killer more than once.

Depending on what you want to do, you could record at lower playback speeds (IIRC, FRC allows up to 1/16 of the normal speed), and speed it up afterwards again. That will at least create the illusion of better performance.

I've been using Fraps for years now and never really had any issues with my fps. When recording they drop from 30 to about 25 but that's it. Maybe something else is causing your trouble.

The amount of FPS reduction (you will not avoid it) may depend on several reasons.

I would suggest to 'record' you clips on a physical HD where not FS9/FSX are located - and better if this drive is not the Windows drive. While flight you still might have low fps and/or stuters but clip playback will be fluid.

Yes, FRAPS will reduce your frame rate greatly. But otherwise, it works great.

Agree with the suggestion of placing your recording on another drive.

I know you probably don't want to hear this, but lowering your scenery complexity and autogen sliders will help you a lot when recording with fraps.

 

Are you watching a finished copy of your recordings?  By finished, I mean already compressed by a video editor like windows movie maker.  If the hard drive you're recording on, is too slow, you'll get bad fps during replay, not because of fraps, but the read speed of the HD can't keep up with the high res recording from fraps (1920x1080 for example).  Fraps capture what is on your screen without compression.

 

Also, for me, using Nvidia's external frame rate limiter with unlimited set in fsx help reduce jerks in the recordings.

The FSRecorder alpha has a great experimental renderer, which will dynamically change the playback rate to keep things looking good. So you can tell it to record at 30fps, and you'll get a true 30fps, it'll just take a bit longer to record. Only downside is that you can't record sound, as it isn't real-time playback.

The most efficient capture program I've seen and use is GameCam. I only lose 1 or 2 frames if any, and the disk space requirement is a small fraction of what FRAPS eats. I can record a 2 hour video for about 1.5GB and after processing with MovieMaker down to less than 1GB. You do lose a slight amount of quality, but not bad. Check my videos on my youtube channel below. Also note my weak system specs. Downside is it's no longer actively developed, and can not handle multiple audio sources, like FRAPS can. Another option is BandiCam, while I find it performs in the middle of of GameCam and FRAPS, like GameCam it doesn't eat your hard drive for lunch. It does have the capability of recording dual audio source and is in active development. I believe I read somewhere it performs better the more cores you have, I only has a C2D system.