Omicrone wrote...
In most cases it's not CPU that bottlenecks FRAPS recording, it's hard drive writing speed. If you have 2 hard drives in RAID0 and you turn off antialiasing and you reduce your in game video effects, you'll notice a considerable increase in performance when recording. Because FRAPS records everything in uncompressed formats, hard drive has to be really fast to cope with writing all that data.
I'm reposting the single most usefull post I've found on FRAPS performance so far:
"Why this is significant should be relatively clear at this point, most modern 7200RPM IDE drives, either SATA or PATA in Windows OS cap out about 80-100MB/s for sequential writes in a single drive configuration. Basically, the HDDs can't keep up with the video stream, so what ends up happening is FRAPs tries to do its own synchronization and adjustment and ultimately what ends up happening is you get dropped frames and choppy gameplay and recording.
A good way to go if you want to capture at full, native high-res is to grab another disk for a RAID 0 array. Right now, mechanical drives still offer competitive write speeds ~100MB/s each and are obviously a much better option than SSDs in terms of capacity, and their write speed scales almost linearly even with onboard RAID controllers. If you're really worried about performance and bandwidth saturation between multiple drives (I believe the ICH10R caps at 550MB/s for all SATA channels combined) is to go with a hardware RAID controller with 2 or 4 channels. Then you'll have a direct QPI link to the CPU rather than sharing bandwidth over DMI through the ICH10R, but its probably not necessary unless you go with more than 2 HDDs in RAID 0. With 2 drives you probably still won't get 60FPS at 1920x1200, it'll be somewhere between 30 and 40 FPS, most likely.
The other thing I noticed with the bump in HD resolutions was a significant increase in CPU time. I believe some of it was due to 64-bit overhead (they released a patch later decreasing CPU overhead for 64-bit), but FRAPs'ing at 1920x1200 pegged a single core on a E6600 Core 2 Duo @ 3.0GHz by itself. Moving to a Q6600 @ 3.6GHz helped a LOT, but I still ran into the HDD bottleneck. With a Core i7, you shouldn't notice too much FRAPs overhead though.
After that, there's not too many options besides increasing the speed of your storage solutions. You can drop resolution but that decreases your enjoyment while playing/filming. You can also drop recording FPS but again, FRAPs will sync your framerates to recording FPS which again, will decrease your enjoyment while playing. You can cut quality in half, but then you're not getting uncompressed video before you edit it and frankly, it looks much worst. "
That's some juicy info there
lolz and it should come in handy later, but atm my main drive is a single Seagate 750G SATA with a 32MB buffer (7200RPM) and I also have 2 Western Digital 80G drives aswell 1 E-IDE and 1 SATA as backups both 7200RPMs. My Segate actually does a good job keeping up with the Fraps recordings and I already knew that fraps records a pretty much non-encoded video hence its size and quality which is great cause I can use AVIVO to convert it an not loose any visually noticeable quality. Also recently I replaced my CL6 DDR2 800MHz sticks of ram with some that had better timmings so thats also been helping in benchmarks etc, now I just need to test it ingame an see how much of a difference there make.
Went from CL6 (6,6,6,18) to (5,5,5,15) or CL5 timmings pretty noticeable speed difference in benchmarks like 3Dmark05 and 06.
I'll do another recording an see just how well my new setup works out an post my findings.
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