Fraps

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Fraps

Fraps on Windows 8.1
Developer(s) Beepa
Stable release 3.5.99 / February 26, 2013 (2013-02-26)[1]
Operating system Microsoft Windows
Type Benchmarking, screencasting
License Shareware
Website fraps.com

Fraps (derived from frames per second) is a benchmarking, screen capture and screen recording utility for Windows. It supports programs that use DirectX and OpenGL (such as games).

Overview

Fraps is proprietary and commercial software, but it is free to use for frame rate display and benchmarking, and free to use with limitations for video capture (30 second time limit, watermark) and screen capture (BMP format only).

The frametimes benchmark feature (logging of individual frame render times) gained attention in 2013 on computer review sites in debate about microstutter in games.[2]

The Windows Vista and Windows 7 desktop can be captured if an Aero theme is used. Windows 8 game capture works, but not desktop capture as of version 3.5.99.[3]

Fraps will record video at high resolution, if the computer is sufficiently powerful. The maximum supported resolution is currently 7680×4800.[4]

Video Encoding

Fraps utilizes a codec optimized for high performance over compression ratio. In order to play back Fraps video files, the Fraps program, or alternatively the ffdshow codec, must be installed on the computer. Due to the relatively low compression and resulting large file sizes, the videos must be transcoded to a more highly compressed format such as H.264 before the recorded videos can be played back smoothly on most media players.[5] There is an option to encode the full RGB value of every pixel, but the default is to use a YUV encoding scheme[6] for better compression. The color space used is Rec.709, full range.[7]

Recent Updates

Since version 3.5.0, Fraps included the ability to generate videos as one huge physical file. Prior to this update, all Fraps footage was split at 4GB and the separated videos would have to be joined at the transcoding stage. However, for backwards compatibility, and for limiting damage in case of a crash, there is still an option which allows users to use the old recording method of splitting videos into 4GB chunks.[8]

Since version 3.5.0 the minimum system requirements have changed. Now it is required a CPU with SSE2 instructions (Pentium 4 & above) and Windows XP or higher.

Since version 3.0, Fraps has supported DirectX 11 and Windows 7.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "FRAPS Changelog". 
  2. ↑ "As the second turns: the web digests our game testing methods". Retrieved 19 May 2013. 
  3. ↑ "Record Windows 8 desktop". 27 April 2012. 
  4. ↑ "Fraps FAQ". Retrieved 8 June 2012. 
  5. ↑ "Why should I encode my videos?". 21 January 2012. 
  6. ↑ "Fraps". Retrieved 19 May 2013. 
  7. ↑ "Fraps discussion (quoted email from Fraps developer)". Retrieved 19 May 2013. 
  8. ↑ "Fraps 3.5.0 Released!". 27 April 2012. 

External links


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