Fraps vs Fraps Alternative (Fraps vs WeGame vs Xfire)

I was curious as to how some alternative software would hold up to FRAPS, so I decided to test two that came to my mind. Xfire and WeGame. So here is a quick rundown of what I found.

The first thing I did was fire up my copy of Alien Swarm. You can get a copy of it for free on Steam if you're curious about it. Following the instructions on how to record a source engine game replay, I made a short demo of the game that I could record using the three softwares I was trying out. The resolution was set to 1280x720.

The memory usage of the clients was as follows:

• WeGame 34 megs
• Xfire 24 megs
• FRAPS 19 megs

WeGame

I ran into a sort of roadblock with WeGame, as the program will not record full "HD" footage unless you are paying the monthly VIP membership. Basically, it seems like you can record and upload lower resolution files (640x360 in the case of my game running @ 1280x720) and if you want higher quality, you pay a monthly fee. So, instead of ending up with a 720p file, I got a small video.

One of the main draws of the wegame client is that it handles the encoding/uploading of your videos & screenshots to a centralized location. Pricing was at the time of this test as follows: $5/month or $50/year.

There is a little green square at the top of your screen showing that wegame is loaded, when you hit the record hotkey it goes away. I did not notice any performance drop while recording with WeGame. The quality wasn't really quality material, and I was annoyed at being unable to record anything at 720p.

The "raw" file ended up being 52 megabytes for 55 seconds of footage, running at 30 frames a second. I put raw in quotes because it appears pretty heavily encoded when you play it back. WeGame has a "Supported games" list, but I am not sure if it limits you to only recording those games, or if you can attempt to record unsupported titles at your own risk.

Xfire

This program has been out for a while, and a lot of people like it for its messaging capabilities, and in-game interface. It is kind of like steam, except it isn't tied to the steam platform. It offers a web browser, messaging, streaming your game footage to friends, and other stuff. Regardless, the only thing we're messing with it the game recording feature.

xfire lets you specify recording at full-size or half-size resolution, framerate, and if you want the mouse cursor to be recorded.

The in-game interface is nice. It lets you know how many seconds you have been recording, and how large the file is. I noticed a pretty hard performance hit when recording the demo, and the footage was noticeably choppy at times.

The x-fire file was 832 megabytes for 49 seconds. Quality was very good, the only negative was the performance/framerate hit. A main issue I have with xfire is only "supported" games work with it. If you have a relatively unknown title, or even an older game it might not work with xfire.

FRAPS

Seeing as this is a fraps-oriented website, I don't think I need to delve into the details of the program. It is a straight-forward utility with few bells and whistles compared to the other two in this post. It monitors the framerate of your application on screen with an overlay, and the coloring of the overlay indicates if fraps is recording or not. It does not have a "supported game" list. If it is using directX or openGL, you can probably get it to record.

I used the Lossless RGB option, and recorded at 30fps. Recording was completely smooth, with no stuttering. The file ended up being 915 megabytes, for 49 seconds of footage. The quality was like watching the game itself, but at a ridiculous cost of drive space.

Encoding

Using staxrip, I encoded them down using a quality setting of CRF22. This is a very good quality setting, but still has a decent filesize. At first, I just did the xfire and fraps footage at 720p, to compare both of them. The xfire footage was stuttering pretty badly, while the fraps replay was entirely smooth. I think the quality was higher with fraps, the shadows were much less grainy. Quality with xfire was by no means bad, but the main killer was the bad framerate with xfire.

After downsizing the videos to the WeGame resolution of 640x360, I began playing them side by side in VLC. The worst quality was WeGame. The footage was fuzzy, and there was a lot of dotted pixels around objects. Xfire and FRAPS were much closer. On objects with smooth curves and lines I want to say fraps was slightly more detailed. Once again, the main failure on xfire was how choppy the video was.


Conclusion

Video Quality:

• WeGame - Poor. I have not used the "VIP" option as I don't wish to pay. But the "free" recording is pretty low quality. If you want the details to be noticed in your video, I wouldn't suggest this at all.
• Xfire - Good. I want to test some other titles to see if I can get a clearer result, but from what I have seen so far the image quality of videos is perfectly acceptable.
• FRAPS - Very good. The Lossless RGB option with fraps really stands out and if you encode the footage properly, and lets the viewer have almost the same experience that they would get if they sat beside you while you played the game.

System Performance:

• WeGame - Great. There is pretty much no noticeable performance drop when recording video
• Xfire - Bad. My fans got louder, and the game was jerky whenever recording with xfire was active. This was at 1280x720, and I usually game at 1920x1200. I can't imagine trying that with performance as bad as it was at 720p.
• FRAPS - Great (in this case). You guys know how variable this can be, but for Alien Swarm, there were no issues. It ran perfectly even with the Lossless RGB option active.

Value - I'm not going to give a value of good/bad to this, just informative.

• WeGame - $5/month or $50/year. You pay a monthly fee to be able to record at higher resolutions. There is no one time purchase, so you must be subscribed to have access to the features.
• Xfire - Free. You can upload your footage, but quality isn't that great. I'd say worse than youtube.
• FRAPS - $37, one time fee. You buy it once, and any updates you can download from the members area.

After messing with WeGame, Xfire, and FRAPS, I still think FRAPS is the best option for people that are not afraid to have some post-recording tasks before a video is ready to be distributed.

Yes I know this is a fraps oriented website, but I tried to be as impartial as possible when writing this up.

Re: Fraps vs WeGame vs Xfire

I wasn't impressed with playclaw at all when I last used it. When I have time I'll give it another try and add it to this post.