Horrible Fraps Performance

[Perfectblue]

While recording in game performance drops considerably. Games will go from 60 FPS to 20 with frequent stutters in performance. I have tried recording in lower FPS and half size movies, but no improvement.This is simply ridiculous especially given my PC stats.

quad core Q9550 oc @ 3.6
Nvidia GTX 280
4 gig DDR 2 at 1066
vista 64

[frapsforum.com]

Are you recording the footage to a separate harddrive (not partition, an actual physical drive) than where your game and operating system files are stored? There is a very significant improvement in performance if you do that.

It sounds like you are using only one disk or something is writing to the same disk you are using for fraps storage. My current system specs are:

Intel E8400 (3ghz) CPU
4GB Memory
ATI 4850 video
Windows 7 64-bit

Harddrive layout is:


Western Digital Caviar SE16 600gb Main Drive (OS, Programs, Storage)
Western Digital Raptor 10k RPM 74GB (fraps)

Running 1920x1200, recording fullscreen and no sound caps out at around 35 fps, half resolution I'm running around 47 fps or so. Changing resolutions to lower levels doesn't help that much with fullscreen. My CPU usage still isn't capped so I'd imagine it is either a limit in software at this point or more than likely, write speed capacity of the drive. I'm curious if a solid state drive would get better performance but I don't have the cash to find out.

If anyone working for an SSD manufacturing company like OCZ, gskill, or corsair wants me to do some tests I'll gladly take a sample drive and post the results! ;)

[Perfectblue]

Thanks for the reply. No at the moment its all on a single hard drive, but if adding an additional hard drive helps stream line recording then I will invest in one.

Perhaps I should pick up a second http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148288 ?

[frapsforum.com]

The comments on that drive you linked are kind of scary.

I have a Western Digital WD6400AAKS that worked well for fraps. I checked out some sites for a comparison and supposedly the WD6401AALS is slightly better in performance for about 15 more bucks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319

If you have a friend or someone that would have a spare drive to try out you might want to go that route to see if the performance improvement is worth the cost.

[Perfectblue]

Thanks again.

I found this Western Digital Raptor as well around the same price, only this one has much less hard drive space (80 gigs) but a higher RPM (10,000) if that needs to be factored in for FRAPs recording.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136033&Tpk=Western%20Digital%20Raptor

If a higher RPM speed will not improve performance too much then perhaps the one you linked with the higher storage would be the better choice.

[frapsforum.com]

I just ran some tests on my two drives:

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Raptor (10k rpm):


Sequential Read : 59.430 MB/s
Sequential Write : 59.406 MB/s
Test Size : 1000 MB


WD6400AAKS:


Sequential Read : 110.668 MB/s
Sequential Write : 108.012 MB/s
Test Size : 1000 MB

I'm actually very surprised at how much the raptor was blown away.

I was hoping that the higher RPM of the raptor might help with smaller files being loaded but that also proved not to be the case:

Raptor:


Sequential Read : 62.648 MB/s
Sequential Write : 62.193 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 15.989 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 37.689 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.630 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.733 MB/s

Test Size : 50 MB

WD6400AAKS:


Sequential Read : 117.122 MB/s
Sequential Write : 110.927 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 54.050 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 84.456 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.685 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 2.253 MB/s

Test Size : 50 MB

It seems (at least based on what was told to me by this application) that you'd be better off getting more disk space anyway. Pretty sure the new(er) raptor with 300 gigs of space would beat it, but that is also more than double the price.

[Perfectblue]

Many thanks for the analysis. I would have thought higher RPMs would have resulted in higher performance, but based on the analysis that is not the case.

I guess I will go with the WD6400AAKS http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218&Tpk=wd6400aaks

Thanks!

[MingoDynasty]

@Perfectblue: I did some testing of my own with Fraps performance. Results are here: http://www.wcreplays.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112398&page=3

I found out that Fraps really likes clock speed, but I was only able to test with my e6400. If I could use you as a guinea pig and you know how to overclock, I'm pretty sure many people would like to know if Fraps likes quad cores as well. What do you say?